In the previous chapters we have seen how the system of orthodox theology gradually grew up, and how by the decrees of church Councils and of Emperors its beliefs were so fastened upon Christians that denial of them was declared a heresy, and was punished as a crime. If at rare intervals heretics were rash enough to raise their voices and call in question an old doctrine, or proclaim a new one, they were soon put to silence. By this means Christian thought was kept nearly stagnant for over a thousand years.
Early in the sixteenth century, however, various influences were conspiring to bring about great changes in men’s religious views. In the first place, Constantinople, capital of the Eastern Roman Empire, had fallen into the hands of the Turks in 1453, and the Christian scholars living there had scattered over western Europe, bringing with them, especially to Italy, manuscripts of classical authors long forgotten during the Dark Ages in the West. A whole new library of the world’s greatest literature was thus suddenly thrown open to educated men. Hence arose the movement variously called theRevival of Learning, or the Renaissance, or Humanism, which sprang up and brought forth in Europe the beginnings of modern literature, modern art, modern science, and modern tendencies in government. In the second place, the invention of printing about the middle of the fifteenth century made it possible for new ideas to spread as they had never spread before, and above all for men everywhere for the first time to read the Bible for themselves. Finally, the discovery of a New World in 1492, and of a new route to the Indies soon after, expanded the world’s horizon to a degree hitherto undreamed of, and never to be possible again. The result of such influences as these was that men were no longer so well content as before to live in a limited world, and to think only the thoughts that had been handed down to them from past ages. Instead, they began to think for themselves, and to venture out into fields of thought hitherto forbidden to them.
In the religious world these new influences caused perhaps even a greater ferment of thought than elsewhere; and this at length came to a head in 1517 when the Catholic monk, Martin Luther, posted his ninety five theses on the church door at Wittenberg, and thus began the Protestant Reformation. For it must be remembered that up to this time the existing Church everywhere in western Europe was the Roman Catholic Church, and that the doctrines everywhere taught were Catholic doctrines. Nevertheless, when the Reformation began, it was the farthest from the thoughts of Luther and those that sympathized with him to form a new Protestant Church, separate from the Catholic Church, and even hostile to it. They desired simply to bring about a reform of certain flagrant abuses and corrupt practices, so that the Church might be purer in the character of its clergy, and might better meet the religious needs of the people at large. Least of all had they any intention of trying to reform the doctrines of Christianity as those were defined in the great Creeds. Melanchthon, who soon became the great theologian of the Reformation in Germany, spoke for Protestants in general when he said, “We do not differ from the Roman Church on any point of doctrine.”
When, however, Protestants had once thrown off the authority of the Catholic Church in other matters, there was every likelihood that they would soon begin to examine into the truth of the doctrines they had received from it; and that all the more, since they were coming gradually to regard the Bible, instead of the Church, as the supreme authority in all matters of religion. In fact, as soon as they began to compare the doctrines of the Creeds with the teachings of the Bible, most of the leading reformers at first showed signs of a wavering belief in the Catholic doctrines of the Trinity and the Deity of Christ. The foundations for such distrust had been laid even before the Reformation by Erasmus of Rotterdam, the most famous biblical scholar of his age, a man who, though he gave strong impulse to the Reformation, yet himself never left the Catholic Church. In his edition of the Greek New Testament, published in 1516, he omitted as an interpolation the text which had long been appealed to as the strongest scriptural proof of the doctrine of the Trinity, and by this and his notes on the New Testament went far to undermine belief in that doctrine for those who took the Bible for their sole authority. For this he was long appealed to by Antitrinitarians, reproached by orthodox Protestants, and considered an Arian2 or an Antitrinitarian by Catholics.
Luther himself heartily disliked the word Trinity and other terms used in the Creeds in speaking of that doctrine, because they were not found in the Scriptures, but were only human inventions. He accordingly left them out of his Catechisms, and omitted the invocation of the Trinity from his litany, and declared that he much preferred to say God rather than Trinity, which had a frigid sound. Catholic writers therefore did not hesitate to call him an Arian.
Melanchthon, too, in the first work which he published on the doctrines of the reformers, instead of treating the doctrine of the Trinity as the very center of the Christian faith, passed it by with scarcely a comment, as a mystery which it was not necessary for a Christian to understand; and he also was charged with Arianism.
Even Calvin, who later on, as leader of the Reformation in Geneva, was to cause Servetus to be burned at the stake for denying the doctrine of the Trinity, declared earlier in his career that the Nicene Creed was better suited to be sung as a song than to be used as an expression of faith; while he also expressed disapproval of the Athanasian Creed and dislike of the commonly used prayer to the Holy Trinity, and in his Catechism touched upon the doctrine very lightly. He had in his turn to defend himself against the charge of Arianism and Sabellianism. Much the same might be said with regard to the views of other leaders of the Reformation: Zwingli at Zurich, Farel at Geneva, and Oecolampadius at Basel.
Now all this does not in the least mean that the chief leaders of Protestantism were at first more than half Unitarian in belief, or that they deserved the charge of heresy which their opponents flung at them, and which they with one accord denied; but it does mean that they were at least doubtful whether these doctrines of the Catholic faith could be found in the Bible, and whether they should be accepted as an essential part of Protestant belief. It is therefore quite possible that if nothing had occurred to disturb the quiet development of their thought, these doctrines might within a generation or two have come to be quietly ignored as not important to Christian faith, and might at length have been discarded outright as mere inventions of men. Instead of this happening, however, it came to pass that when the reformers of Germany and Switzerland came at length to decide what statements of the Protestant belief they should adopt in their new Confessions, they kept as many as possible of the old Catholic doctrines, and especially emphasized their adherence to the Nicene and Athanasian Creeds.
Now, why and how did this result come about, leaving to Protestantism a system of belief of which one part was based upon the authority of Scripture, while the other was simply taken over from the tradition of the Catholic Church? There were two principal reasons. In the first place, those who first proclaimed beliefs which led in the direction of Unitarianism were leaders in the sect of the Anabaptists, and these beliefs were thus unfortunately associated, as we shall see in the next chapter, with certain extravagant and fanatical tendencies in that sect, which seemed to threaten the overthrow of all social and religious order. The fate of the Reformation still hung in the balance; and the reformers could not afford to take any risks by tolerating a movement which, on account of its radical social tendencies, would be certain to alienate the sympathy of the princes who had thus far supported it; for if these were now to abandon it, it must inevitably fail. Hence the reformers had to remain on conservative ground, and they therefore opposed the Anabaptists and tried to silence their leaders.
In the second, place, Servetus, the first writer to attract much attention in Europe by his writings against the Catholic doctrine of the Trinity, instead of gently and subtly undermining it, brought fresh and severe criticism upon Protestantism by the sharpness of his attacks upon what had for a millennium been considered the most sacred dogma of the Christian religion, and he so shocked and angered the reformers themselves that they recoiled from him in horror. But for this reason also, they might perhaps have gradually gone on from their early misgivings about the doctrine until they had left it far behind. As it was, being forced to choose at once between seeming to approve of Servetus and his positions, and remaining on the perfectly safe ground of the old doctrines, they naturally enough did the latter, and with one consent disowned Servetus and denounced his teaching. How this result came about in this twofold way, we shall see in the next following chapters.
We have now to trace through several chapters the story of how, during the halfcentury after the beginning of the Reformation, Christians who could not accept the orthodox doctrines about the Trinity and the person of Christ tried in various parts of western Europe to proclaim views more or less Unitarian, only sooner or later to be met in each case by excommunication from the Church, banishment from home, imprisonment, or even death itself, until at length countries were found whose laws allowed them freedom of conscience, and thus made it possible for them to worship God after their own manner and to organize churches of their own.
The first of those to adopt and teach these views were found in what is known as the Anabaptist movement. This movement was one which, though it had some able and educated leaders, found its chief following among the humbler classes of society. It was in fact a loose fusion of two quite different elements: a popular religious movement of devout and earnest souls whose spiritual ancestry went back of the Reformation to circles of pious mystics and humble Christians in the bosom of the Catholic Church in the Middle Ages, out of which had come such devout classics as the Imitation of Christ; and along with this, a popular social movement among the peasantry, whose sense of the wrongs and oppressions they had long suffered had been stirred up anew by the Reformation, and who looked for a reformed religion to bring them a reformed social order. Both religiously and socially they were the radicals of the Protestant Reformation.
The Anabaptist movement took its rise in 1525 at Zurich, as the radical wing of the Swiss Reformation which had begun there under the leadership of Zwingli; but it soon got beyond control, and it ran into such extravagances that some of its leaders were put to death, and others with their followers were banished. Yet the movement seemed somehow to answer a strong religious and social demand, and in spite of persecutions, and of an edict of the Diet of Speyer in 1529 that every Anabaptist should be put to death, it soon spread like wildfire over large parts of Western Europe; and in our story we shall meet it in Western Germany, Holland, Italy, Switzerland, Moravia, Poland, Transylvania, and England. These Anabaptists embraced a wide variety of teachings, differing according to their leader or the locality; but the one thing which was common to them all, and which seemed most sharply to distinguish them from other Protestants, was their objection to infant baptism, and their insistence that upon reaching adult Christian life persons who had been baptized in infancy should be baptized again. Hence the name given them by their opponents, Anabaptists (i.e., rebaptizers) ; although this name was ere long applied, in more or less reproach, to religious radicals of the period, in general, without much regard to their particular beliefs as to baptism.
Their interest in the question of baptism, however, was only incidental. Their first concern was in the establishment of a pure Church, reformed from the ground up by its strict adherence in every particular to the teachings of Scripture, which they accepted literally and tried faithfully to follow. Thus they believed that followers of Christ should not resist evil, nor bear arms, nor own private property, nor hold civil office, nor resort to law courts, nor take oaths; and their movement was largely a lay movement. In these respects they might be called the Quakers of their time; and indeed the Quakers of England were not a little influenced by their teaching and example. They also believed in separation of Church and State, and stood firmly for freedom of conscience and against religious persecution. In their view of religious knowledge they were mystics, holding that God makes his truth and will known to the souls of men directly, and they relied much upon the guidance of the Spirit; but though they were in the main people of most exemplary lives, they would sometimes ascribe to the influence of the divine Spirit impulses which seemed to others to have a very human origin, and thus in the name of religion some of them ran into gross immorality.
Instead, however, of having the backing of the civil power, as the Lutherans did, the Anabaptists were generally opposed by it; unfortunately they had no leader like Luther powerful enough to guide their movement and hold it in control; and they were far too loosely organized to be able to control their own members. The result was that a movement which had in it much that was good was at length wrecked by the excesses of its wilder adherents. At Monster, where it was especially strong, it took a revolutionary form; and such civil disorder ensued and such fanaticism ruled that the whole movement had in 1535 to be suppressed with terrible bloodshed. Now disturbances such as these tended to bring the whole Protestant movement into ill repute, and the leaders of the Reformation reacted in alarm and disgust. The Anabaptists were therefore more bitterly hated and more harshly persecuted than were the members of any other religious movement during the sixteenth century; and it is said that by 1546 no fewer than 30,000 of them had been put to death in Holland and Friesland. The remnants of them that survived persecution were at length gathered into a more compact body with sober leadership; and of these sprang the Mennonites of Holland, and the Baptists of England and America.
Our reason for being interested in the Anabaptists in this history is that, though the majority of them remained orthodox on the main doctrines of the Creeds, some of their most distinguished leaders became decidedly liberal, and instead of stopping where Luther stopped, went on to reject doctrines, like that of the Trinity, which were not taught in the Scriptures. Since these were the earliest pioneers of Unitarianism in Europe, it will be worthwhile to glance at the career of a few of them and see what they believed, and what became of them and their doctrine.
Martin Cellarius (or Borrhäus) deserves to be remembered because he is said to have been the first Protestant openly to proclaim antitrinitarian beliefs. He was born at Stuttgart in 1499, was liberally educated, and became a friend of Melanchthon. While leading the life of a teacher in Germany he early in life became an Anabaptist, and for this he suffered imprisonment in Prussia. He published in 1527 a book, On the Works of God, in which he taught that Jesus was God only in the sense in which we may all be gods — by being filled with God’s spirit. For spreading this and other heretical views, he was obliged in 1536, after his release from prison, to flee to Switzerland; but there he became professor at the University of Basel, and was permitted to live in peace until his death of the plague in 1564.
The most important of all the antitrinitarian Anabaptists was Hans Denck, who has been called one of the profoundest thinkers of the sixteenth century. Born in Bavaria about 1495, he became famous as an accomplished Hebrew and classical scholar, and was appointed rector of a celebrated school at Nuremberg; but for having become an Anabaptist he was after a year deprived of his office and ordered in 1524 to leave the city before nightfall. From a book which he published later it is clear that he was far from accepting the usual orthodox teaching as to the Trinity, for he gave the doctrine a mystical sort of explanation which altogether changed its established meaning; and he was also unorthodox as to the atonement, and the eternal punishment of the wicked. For some years after his banishment he lived the life of a wandering preacher, persecuted for his faith and driven from city to city, till at last he found a brief refuge at Basel, where he was carried off by the plague in 1527.
A third Anabaptist Antitrinitarian was Johannes Campanus, who was born near the border between Belgium and Germany. He was a scholar, and for a time he enjoyed the friendship of Luther and Melanchthon; but he became more or less influenced by Anabaptist tendencies, and fell under suspicion on account of his utterances as to the Trinity. After suffering imprisonment and other persecution for attempting to win converts to his views by preaching, he determined to spread them in a book, which be issued about 1531 “in opposition to the whole world since the Apostles,” of which the gentle Melanchthon said that its author deserved to be hanged. In this and another work he strove to expose and correct the corruptions of Christian doctrine, and to restore the pure teaching of primitive Christianity. He taught that only two persons are divine, the Father and the Son, that the Son is inferior to the Father, and that the Spirit is not a person, but a divine power. For stirring up the peasants he was arrested about 1553, and is said to have been imprisoned at Kleve for some twenty six years.
Perhaps the most extraordinary career of all was that of David Joris, who was born in Flanders or Holland in 1501. He was brought up the son of a traveling mountebank, and was quite without education. Having become an Anabaptist preacher he said he was a prophet, and showed an extraordinary power of attracting devoted personal followers. While much of a fanatic, he was withal a man of keen mind, and was the author of nearly three hundred works, of which the most important was entitled The Wonderbook. He taught that the doctrine of the Trinity tends only to obscure our knowledge of God, in whose being there is no distinction of persons. For nearly ten years he traveled about Holland and adjoining parts of Germany and gathered many followers, though often obliged to go in disguise in order to avoid the persecutions that continued to follow him and them, in the course of which his mother was put to death, and he himself had numerous hairbreadth escapes. At length he resolved to go beyond the reach of his persecutors, and in some distant land to wait in peace for the second coming of Christ, which he fervently expected to live to witness. After traveling as far as Venice in search of a place, he returned to Switzerland and with a few trusted friends settled in 1544 at Basel, under the assumed name of Jan van Brugge. He was admitted to citizenship, joined the Reformed Church, purchased an estate, and lived in grand style out of the wealth which his followers had entrusted to him, was bountiful to the poor, and was held in great respect for his irreproachable life until 1556 when he died, having all along kept up a secret correspondence with his Anabaptist followers in Holland.
Then followed one of those droll humors which sometimes enliven the page of religious history. Three years later the real identity of Jan van Brugge was discovered. The pious citizens of Basel were scandalized beyond measure. Little could now be done to mend matters, but that little was done in the most thorough manner. In accordance with an old medieval custom a formal trial was instituted against the deceased. The theological faculty of the University investigated the case of David Joris and pronounced him guilty of the most blasphemous heresies; whereupon the authorities passed sentence of burning upon the heretic. His grave was opened, and his body was exhibited to the spectators, and was then, along with all his books and his portrait, publicly burnt by the common hangman, after which his family were required to do penance in the cathedral. Thus the serious reproach of having entertained a heretic unawares was at length removed from the consciences of the worthy Basileans.
It will be necessary to do little more than mention the names of three others who are classed among the Anabaptists, and of whom indeed little is known save their fate. Jakob Kautz, a young preacher of Bockenheim, who denied the doctrine of eternal punishment and zealously defended at Worms the views of Denck, was imprisoned at Strassburg in 1528, and then banished. In 1530 at Basel, Conradin Bassen, who had denied the deity of Christ, was beheaded and his head was set up on a pole. For similar errors Michael Sattler, who had been leader of Anabaptist churches in Switzerland, after having his tongue cut out and pieces of flesh torn from his body, was burned at the stake at Rothenburg on the Neckar, in 1527.
It should not be inferred that these Anabaptist heretics are to be closely identified with Unitarianism, in the modern sense of that term. For while it is true that they were all more or less unsound as to the Trinity and their views of Christ, yet they were also all more or less full of vagaries with which Unitarians have had little sympathy. Moreover, the two are radically different as to temper of mind. The Anabaptists were in their religious temperament mystics, relying implicitly upon some inner light for religious guidance, and were therefore always in danger of running into fanaticism; whereas Unitarianism has throughout its history been marked by its faith in the calmer guidance of reason, and if sometimes cold, has at all events always remained sane.
The important point to note about the Anabaptists in connection with this history is that these radicals of the early Reformation, springing from widely separated places in Protestant Europe, bear witness to a widespread dissatisfaction with the Catholic doctrines about God and Christ, and illustrate many different attempts (for no two of them thought alike) to arrive at beliefs more in harmony with Scripture, and more acceptable to reason, than were the doctrines of the creeds. Having to bear, however, the double weight of heresy and fanaticism, they were foredoomed to failure. Unitarian thought had to wait for saner teachers, more sober leaders, and freer laws, before it could become organized and hope to spread. If this tendency of thought was thus crushed in Switzerland, Germany, and Holland, the liberalizing influence of the Anabaptist movement had meanwhile spread to other lands; and we shall later see how in Italy, Poland, England, and even in Holland itself, it was among Anabaptists that Unitarian thought first arose.
Meantime what the development of a more liberal theology most needed was a spokesman, who was not handicapped from the start by association with a discredited movement, and who, instead of joining his attacks upon the doctrine of the Trinity with various other speculations, should win more pointed attention by concentrating his attacks upon that doctrine alone. Such a leader appeared in the person of Servetus, to whom we must next turn.
In a previous chapter we saw that the leaders of the Protestant Reformation, noting the fact that the teaching of the Catholic Creeds as to the Trinity and the two natures in Christ was not to be found in Scripture, seemed at first half inclined, if not quite yet to deny those doctrines outright, at all events to pass them by without emphasis as doctrines not necessary for salvation. We next saw how some of the Anabaptist leaders who were so bold as to deny those doctrines, brought their own views on these matters into the greater disrepute through the extravagance of their movement in other directions. Now if the case had been dropped here, it might have been long before Antitrinitarian views would have asserted themselves in Protestantism; but we have now to turn to a man who arose just when the Anabaptist heretics had been pretty well put to silence, and forced the question upon the attention of the Reformers more insistently and sharply than ever. This man was a Spanish Catholic named Michael Servetus. He was in more than one respect one of the most remarkable men of the sixteenth century; while the tragic death which he suffered made him the first and most conspicuous martyr to the faith whose history we are following.
Though our records of the life of Servetus are scanty and inconsistent, and the gaps in them have often been filled up by conjectures which have later proved to be mistaken, it seems most likely that he was born in 1511 at Tudela, a small city in Navarre, and that in his infancy his parents removed to Villanueva in Aragon, where his father had received an appointment as royal Notary, an office of some distinction, and where the family lived in handsome style. His parents were devoted Catholics, and it is thought that he may at first have been designed for the priesthood. Little is known to a certainty about his early education, but he seems to have been a precocious youth, and early in his teens to have acquired a knowledge of Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, and to have become well versed in mathematics and the scholastic philosophy.
There was much going on in Spain at this period to make a serious minded youth thoughtful about questions of religion. Ferdinand and Isabella the Catholic were on the throne, determined to secure political unity in their new nation by compelling religious uniformity; and a spirit of the most intolerant orthodoxy controlled the government. In 1492, for refusing to deny the faith of their fathers and profess Christianity, 800,000 Jews had been banished from the kingdom. In the same year the Moors had been overthrown in Granada, and although for a few years they were granted toleration, they were soon compelled to choose between abandoning their Mohammedanism and being driven from Spain. In both cases it was the dogma of the Trinity that proved the insurmountable obstacle for races which held as the first article of their faith the undivided unity of God. Within the generation including Servetus’s boyhood, some 20,000 victims, Jewish or Mohammedan, were thus burned at the stake. Despite the resistance of the liberty loving Aragonians, the Inquisition was set up among them to root out heresy; and these things must all have made a deep impression upon the mind of the young Servetus, and may well have laid the foundation for the main passion of his life.
Whatever may have been intended for him before, when Servetus was seventeen his father determined that he should enter the law, and to that end sent him across the Pyrenees to the University of Toulouse, then the most celebrated in France. Here he made a most wonderful discovery. For the first time in his life he found a Bible to read. He simply devoured it. It seemed to him as though it were a book fallen into his hands from heaven, containing the sum of all philosophy and all science, and it made upon him a profound impression which lasted as long as he lived. For hitherto he had been taught to believe that the dogma of the Trinity was the very center of the Christian religion, and he knew that for refusing to accept it thousands in his own land had recently been put to death. Despite all this, the doctrine as taught in the schools had seemed to him but a dead thing, yielding no inspiration for his religious life, and used chiefly as a subject of hairsplitting debates between scholastic theologians. Now to his surprise and infinite relief he found in the Bible nothing of all this, but instead the most wonderful religious book in all the world, full of life, and revealing to him as a vivid reality the great, loving heart of Christ. The more he read it, the more he was inspired by it, and the more he became convinced that not only for Jews and Mohammedans but for all men the doctrine of the Trinity as then taught in the Church was the greatest stumbling block. For the masses of the people could never comprehend it, and even the teachers themselves seemed not to understand it. His mind was made up. He would devote his life to exposing the errors in this doctrine, and to showing men what was the true teaching of the Bible about God and Christ. He was as yet but eighteen years old!
The study of the law had by now lost any attraction it may ever have had for him, and after about a year at the University he left it for the service of the friar Juan de Quintana, soon to become confessor to the young Emperor, Charles V. He followed his master to court, and never saw his parents or his native land again. Thus it happened that as one of the Emperor’s suite Servetus was early in 1530 present at Bologna, where Charles, though he had long since been crowned Emperor in Germany, was now to receive from Pope Clement VII a religious coronation with both the iron crown of Lombardy and the crown of the Holy Roman Empire, amid scenes of the most riotous luxury and extravagance that the modern world had ever known. Here Servetus received a second profound impression upon his religious experience, calculated by sharp contrast to emphasize that made by his recent discovery of the Bible. For on the one hand he saw the Pope bowed down to by the earth’s mightiest as little less than a god, and this filled him with a revulsion from which he never recovered;3 while on the other hand, behind the scenes, he saw among the highest dignitaries of the Church sickening evidences of worldliness' selfish ambition, cynical skepticism, and unconcealed immorality. Henceforth the official religion of the Church seemed to him but a hollow mockery, and the Pope became for him the very Antichrist predicted in the New Testament.
From Bologna the Emperor proceeded to Germany to attend the famous Diet of Augsburg, where Protestantism was to receive political recognition under the Empire, and where Melanchthon was to offer for the Emperor’s approval the Augsburg Confession as a statement of the Protestant doctrines. Servetus followed in the Emperor’s suite. He had no doubt already seen some of the writings of Melanchthon, and perhaps also of others of the reformers; and he must have been eager to see and hear men who, like himself, had at heart the great cause of purifying the Church. Although with his position in the service of the man who had the Emperor’s closest confidence, and with his own talents, he had the most enviable opportunity for worldly advancement, the only thing that now really interested him was to reform the Catholic doctrine of the Trinity. He evidently saw little chance of accomplishing anything in this direction in Catholic circles, and so he gave up all his worldly prospects, left Quintana’s service, and went to seek the leaders of Protestantism. For although the Augsburg Confession had just declared that Protestants accepted the Nicene and Athanasian Creeds, the Protestant Churches had not yet adopted a permanent creed of their own; and he felt that if he could only get the chance to lay his views before the leaders of Protestant thought, he could surely get them to see the doctrine of the Trinity as he saw it.
Servetus accordingly went in the autumn of 1530 to Basel, and sought repeated interviews with Oecolampadius, the leader of the Reformation in that city. Though Servetus was but a youth of nineteen, a foreigner and a Catholic, and Oecolampadius was far more than twice his age, a distinguished man busy with important affairs, yet he received Servetus for some time patiently, and though scandalized by the views he expressed tried to convince him of his errors. Before long he found Servetus so conceited, so obstinate in his opinions, and so much more bent on pressing his own views than upon humbly seeking to learn the truth, that he lost patience; and when Servetus complained because Oecolampadius would no longer listen to him, the latter wrote in reply, “I have more reason for complaint than you. You thrust yourself upon me as if I had nothing to do but answer your questions.” Servetus therefore, after having failed to get an interview with Erasmus, who, was then living at Basel, next went to Strassburg to see what he might accomplish with the reformers there.
Now Strassburg was at that time the most liberal of the Protestant cities. Denck and other Anabaptists had been there but a few years before, and their influence was still felt. Bucer (Butzer) and Capito, the Strassburg reformers, received Servetus most kindly, and as they seemed at first to feel some sympathy for his views, he began to hope that here at last they would be adopted. But Zwingli, the founder and leader of the Swiss Reformation, who had already been told of Servetus’s heretical opinions, had warned the other reformers against these dreadful blasphemies as he considered them, lest they spread and bring incalculable harm upon the Protestant cause. So that in the end Servetus made no better progress here than at Basel.
It may seem almost incredible that a youth of nineteen should have had the effrontery thus to approach the acknowledged leaders of Protestant thought, men more than twice his age, and to assume to set them right as to the very first and most important article of their faith; but, as he later declared, he felt moved in this matter by a divine impulse, as though he had a fresh revelation from God to communicate. If he could but once get his views fairly before men’s minds, they would be sure to be accepted; and then the whole world could easily be won to the Christian faith. Nothing daunted therefore, and without trying to travel further and attempt to win over Melanchthon or Luther, he now resolved upon another course. He would put his views into print where everyone might see them. Even this was not so easily managed. At Basel, the publishing center of northern Europe, the printer would not take the risk of publishing his manuscript; but after a little while one was found elsewhere who would print the book, though he dared not put his name and place on the title page. Servetus, however, had no such misgivings, but was so confident in his cause that he boldly printed his own name as author.
Thus was issued in the summer of 1531, at Hagenau in Alsace, a little book which was destined to start a profound revolution in the religious world. It was entitled On the Errors of the Trinity. It was written in rather crude Latin, with thoughts not too well digested or arranged, though its main intention is clear enough, and it shows a remarkable range of reading for a youth. It was put on sale in the Rhine cities, and its influence soon spread far and wide through Switzerland and Germany and into northern Italy; and wherever it was read it won marked attention. Servetus seems naively still to have expected that the reformers would actually welcome his contribution to their cause as soon as they took time to reflect on what he had to say; but instead they were thrown into the greatest consternation by it.
Melanchthon, it is true, admitted that he was reading it a good deal; and he and Oecolampadius agreed that it contained many good points; but any slight praise was soon drowned by the general chorus of denunciation. To Luther it seemed “an abominably wicked book”; Melanchthon foresaw (correctly enough, as the event proved) great tragedies resulting from it; Oecolampadius saw the whole Reformation imperiled by this new Hydra, if he were tolerated, since the Emperor would hold the Protestant churches responsible for these odious blasphemies; Bucer said from his pulpit that the author deserved to be drawn and quartered;5 and the vocabulary in general was exhausted for offensive epithets to heap upon him. It was charged that he must have gone to Africa and learned his doctrine from the Moors, and that he was in secret league with the Grand Turk who was just then threatening to conquer Christian Europe. As soon as the character of the book became generally known the sale of it was forbidden at Basel and Strassburg; and when it was brought next year to the notice of Quintana, to his infinite chagrin that it should have been written by one who had been his proteged, he had “that most pestilent book” at once prohibited throughout the Empire. So thoroughly was it suppressed that some twenty years later, when a copy was eagerly wanted at Geneva in the trial of Servetus for heresy, not one could be found.
At the request of Oecolampadius, Bucer wrote a refutation of Servetus’s book (which, however, he never ventured to publish), and he warned him that though he would not himself do him the least harm, the magistrate would no longer suffer him to stay at Strassburg, nor would he himself intercede with the magistrate in Servetus’s behalf. Servetus therefore returned to Basel, where he had previously made at least a partial living by giving language lessons; and he brought with him a part of the edition of his book to dispose of there or to send on to the book fair at Lyon. Here too he found the feeling against him so intense that he scarcely knew what to expect next. Accordingly he wrote to Oecolampadius offering to leave town if it were thought best, but also saying that he was willing to publish a retraction of what he had written. Indulgence was given him, and the result was that the following spring he brought out another and smaller book, entitled Dialogues on the Trinity; for the dialogue was at that time a favorite form for discussing subjects of every sort.
This new work was hastily and carelessly done, but it was ostensibly meant to correct the errors and imperfections of the former book which, he said, were due partly to his own lack of skill, and partly to the carelessness of the printer. It was in fact intended only to strengthen his former arguments by meeting the objections which the reformers had raised against them; and he prided himself that they had not brought forward a single passage of Scripture to disprove what he had said. He omitted, to be sure, some of the objectionable things in the first book, and he restated his views in language somewhat nearer the teaching of the Church; but so far as his main purpose was concerned, it was the same thought as before, only expressed more briefly, and in another form. His opponents were in no wise appeased, and as he lacked both friends and money, while his ignorance of German hindered him in trying to earn his bread, he now left the German world, and for more than twenty years was as completely lost to sight as if the earth had opened and swallowed him up. What became of him, what an adventurous and exciting life he led during this long period, and how at length he suffered a cruel death for the same teachings that obliged him to leave Germany now, must be told in a later chapter.
What now was the teaching of these books, that they should have so shocked the reformers? Let us glance at them in the briefest and clearest summary of them possible. Taking the teaching of the Bible as absolute and final authority, Servetus held that the nature of God can not be divided, as by any doctrine of one being in three persons, inasmuch as no such doctrine is taught in the Bible, to which indeed the very terms Trinity, essence, substance, and the like as used in the Creeds are foreign, being mere inventions of men. The earlier Fathers of the Church also knew nothing of them, and they were simply foisted upon the Church by the Greeks, who cared more to make men philosophers than to have them to be true Christians.6 Equally unscriptural is the doctrine of the two natures in Christ. He pours unmeasured scorn and satire on these doctrines, calling them illogical, unreasonable, contradictory, imaginary; and he ridicules the received doctrine of the Holy Spirit. The doctrine of one God in three persons he says can not be proved, nor even really imagined; and it raises questions which can not be answered, and leads to countless heresies. Those that believe in it are fools and blind: they become in effect atheists, since they are left with no real God at all; while the doctrine of the Trinity really involves a Quaternity of four divine beings. It is the insuperable obstacle to the conversion of Jews and Mohammedans to Christianity;7 and such blasphemous teachings ought to be utterly uprooted from men’s minds.
In place of these artificial doctrines of the Creeds, Servetus draws from the Bible the following simple doctrines, and quotes many texts to prove them. Firstly, the man Jesus, of whom the Gospels tell, is the Christ, anointed of God. Secondly, this man Jesus the Christ is proved by his miraculous powers and by the statements of Scripture to be literally the human Son of God, because miraculously begotten by him. Thirdly, this man is also God, since he is filled with the divinity which God had granted him; hence he is divine not by nature, as the Creeds teach, but solely by God’s gift. God himself is incomprehensible, and we can know him only through Christ, who is thus all in all to us. The Holy Spirit is a power of God, sent in the form of an angel or spirit to make us holy. And the only kind of Trinity in which we may rightly believe is this: that God reveals himself to man under three different aspects (dispositiones); for the same divinity which is manifested in the Father is also shared with his Son Jesus, and with the Spirit which dwells in us, making our bodies, as St. Paul says, “the temple of God.”
Servetus is often reckoned the first and greatest martyr of Unitarianism; but though all this was of course a very different doctrine from that of the Creeds, it will have been seen that Servetus was not a Unitarian in any true sense. He was more like a Sabellian than anything else, though really his system was peculiar to himself. So it has always remained, for no school of followers rose after him, as after Luther and Calvin, to take up his teachings and carry them on. As a matter of fact, he never withdrew from the Catholic Church, and he says at the end of his second little book that he does not wholly agree nor wholly disagree with either party. Both Catholic and Protestant seem to him to teach partly truth and partly error, while each perceives only the other’s errors, but not his own. The matter would be easy enough, he says, if one might only speak out freely in the Church what he felt was God’s truth now, without regard to what ancient prophets may have said.
Yet while Servetus made few converts to his precise system of thought, his two little books, though they probably did not circulate in very large numbers, spread far and wide and had an epochmaking influence; for they focused men’s attention sharply upon the foundations of the doctrine of the Trinity. The Catholic world paid little attention to them, but their influence on the Protestant world was at once shown. Instead of converting the reformers to his own views as he had hoped, Servetus simply made them more than ever firmly determined to adhere to the doctrines of the Catholic Creeds. Melanchthon, whom we have seen in his first treatise passing the Trinity by as barely deserving mention, and as not necessary to salvation in his next edition in 1535 treats the doctrines which Servetus had attacked as absolutely necessary to salvation. Calvin, whom we also saw in his first Catechism slurring over the doctrine of the Trinity very lightly, gives it full treatment in his Institutes in 1536, and in 1553 will have Servetus burned at the stake for denying it. All the Protestant creeds are careful henceforth to be unmistakably orthodox on this point. On the other hand, many who read Servetus became convinced with him that the Trinity is no doctrine of the Bible, and hence ceased to believe it. We shall find numerous traces of his thought in the course of the following chapters.
Twenty years later Servetus enlarged these little books into a much more important one, as we shall see; but although it brought him to the stake, and thus gave his denial of the Trinity great notoriety, all but a very few copies of it were destroyed before any one had a chance to read them, and it is not known to have had any considerable influence. It is through the two little books spoken of in this chapter that Servetus started men out on the line of thought which led at length to modern Unitarianism. How the influence of them spread, undermining belief in the Trinity in various countries during the next twenty years, remains to be seen in the next two chapters.
In the two previous chapters we have seen how, during the early years of the Reformation, in Protestant Holland, Germany, and Switzerland, antitrinitarian thought arose only to be at once suppressed. In the present chapter we shall have to trace how at the same time the same sort of thing went on in Catholic Italy. In that country, where men could see the grossest corruptions of the Church at close range, and were anxious to see it purified, the ideas of the reformers at first spread very widely. But the Church’s power to suppress heresy was so great that the Reformation never gained much foothold south of the Alps save in two regions, the Republic of Venice, and the Grisons in southeastern Switzerland; and it is in these two districts that we shall find an interesting development toward Unitarian beliefs.
The city of Venice, as the commercial metropolis of Southern Europe, had a very active commerce with the manufacturing cities of Protestant Germany. Hence although Venice had long had on its books the usual laws against heresy, including one for the burning of heretics, the authorities were loath to enforce them strictly, lest their trade with the northern Protestants should be injured. The result was that the Reformation teachings which early were brought to Venice by German traders rapidly spread in the city, and before long to all the larger towns of the Venetian territory. Many Protestant congregations were formed and regular meetings were held, though of course with more or less secrecy for fear of persecution.
Along with other Protestants, Anabaptist preachers also began early to cross the Alps, probably by way of the Grisons, and their doctrines too spread with great rapidity. By the middle of the sixteenth century over sixty places are reported where they had congregations, and there were doubtless many more than these. The Italian Anabaptists were better organized than their northern brethren, for besides regular ministers they had numerous “bishops,” who traveled about from church to church, preaching, ordaining ministers, keeping up close relations between the various congregations, and warning them of danger. Although they had a few members of wealth, or even of noble birth, they were almost entirely of the humble classes, mainly artisans; and of course they had to meet secretly in private houses. They manifested the same liberal tendencies in belief here as north of the Alps, and these received a strong additional impulse from the little books of Servetus on the Trinity, which seem to have been widely circulated among them. His influence in these parts had by 1539 spread to such an extent that reports of it reached Melanchthon, and a letter in his name was addressed to the Senate of Venice, urging that every effort be used to suppress the abominable doctrine of Servetus which had been introduced there;1 though the letter, if ever received, had little effect.
How thoroughly the orthodox teaching had decayed among these Anabaptists of northern Italy is shown by the conclusions of a remarkable church Council which they held at Venice in 1550 — so far as is known the only Council they ever held at all. They had a strong church at Vicenza, and discussion had arisen there in that or the previous year as to whether Christ were God or man; and as there was a difference of opinion, it was decided to call together a Council to determine the matter. Messengers were sent to all the congregations in northern Italy, inviting each of them to send its minister and a lay delegate. The Council met at Venice in September, 1550, and was attended by some sixty delegates from several of the larger cities and many of the smaller towns in Italy, as well as from congregations in the Grisons, and from St. Gallen and Basel in Switzerland. It is inferred that as many as forty churches must have been represented. The delegates were carefully scattered about in lodgings so as not to attract attention and invite persecution, and their expenses were contributed by the larger congregations. The sessions were held in secret, and continued almost daily for forty days; they were opened with prayer, and the Lord’s Supper was celebrated three times. Having taken the teaching of Scripture for their sole authority, they at length agreed upon ten points of doctrine. The one of most interest to us here is the very first article, which declares that Christ was not God but man, born of Joseph and Mary, but endowed with divine powers. These conclusions were made binding upon all their congregations, and were accepted by all but one, which was therefore forced to break off fellowship with the others; and one Pietro Manelfi, who had formerly been a Catholic priest, but having turned Protestant had for the past year been a traveling Anabaptist preacher, visiting the scattered congregations all over northern and central Italy, was appointed one of two to go about among them and preach the doctrines just adopted.
Meanwhile the Protestant doctrines had been making such alarming progress in Italy that the means previously used by the Catholic Church to suppress heresy were proving insufficient, so that in 1542 the Italian Inquisition had been established for the especial purpose of hunting out heretics and bringing them to punishment; and in the Venetian territory many Protestants had already been imprisoned or banished, had recanted or fled. Perhaps scenting danger to himself, the ex-priest Manelfi, about a year after the Council at Venice, returned to the obedience of the Roman Church, appeared before the Inquisition, gave a full account of the spread of Anabaptism and of the proceedings of the Council, and betrayed the names of all the members whom he could recall. Orders were at once issued for their arrest, and trials of them went on at Venice during the next year. Some recanted, some fled the country and went to Turkey where under Mohammedan rule they could find the freedom of worship denied them in Christian Italy, some seem to have joined a community of Anabaptists in Moravia, many doubtless suffered imprisonment, and two or three, returning to Italy years afterwards, were then seized and put to death. The burning of heretics had ceased to be practised at Venice, for the reason given above. Instead, a method of execution was used which would be more secret, and hence bring less reproach upon the city. In the darkness of midnight the victim, attended only by a priest to act as confessor, was taken in a gondola out into the Adriatic, where a second gondola was in waiting. A plank was laid between the two, and the prisoner, weighted with stone, was placed upon it. A signal was given, the gondolas parted, and the heretic was no more.
Thus in the Republic of Venice antitrinitarian beliefs, which had come to prevail in a large majority of the Anabaptist congregations, came to a tragic end. Of the most numerous congregation, that at Vicenza, at least a few members still remained in 1553, in correspondence with one of their faith in Switzerland; but though many others doubtless continued here and there to cherish their faith in private, or to speak of it to trusted friends, they no longer dared do anything to win converts to it, and we bear no more of them, there or elsewhere. We noted, however, that some of the delegates to the Council at Venice came from Anabaptist congregations in the Grisons, and we must next turn thither to trace another chapter of struggle and persecution.
The antitrinitarian movement which in the last chapter we followed among the Anabaptists of northern Italy was, as was noted, with few exceptions a movement among the poor and humble. Its main concern was with practical reforms of the Christian religion, considered as a means of bringing men nearer to God. We have now to turn to a quite different sort of movement, which took its rise among some of the most highly cultivated minds in Italy, and was mainly concerned with the reform of the Christian doctrines. It was the latter of these two antitrinitarian tendencies that was destined in the next generation to take root among the liberal Protestants of Poland, and to determine the prevailing character of the Unitarian movement for nearly three centuries.
The spirit of free inquiry which began with Italian Humanism in the generation before the Reformation had no little influence on some of the finest spirits in the Catholic Church, able scholars, eloquent preachers, and noble ladies; and through these it soon began widely to affect the educated middle classes, especially in the cities. This movement, which was much influenced by the writings of the German reformers, aimed at reform from within the Church, and sought to lead men to cultivate a simple, devout form of Christianity, which greatly valued religion as a personal experience, but laid little emphasis upon creeds or doctrines. This first step toward a more liberal form of faith within the bosom of the Catholic Church can best be followed by our now speaking of several persons active in this movement, who were of importance in the religious history of the time.
Juan de Valdez was a Spanish nobleman, born about 1500, who had to flee from the Spanish Inquisition and in 1530 came to Italy to live. He was a gentleman of rare accomplishments and great social charm, and his home at Naples became the resort of noble ladies and gentlemen, distinguished scholars, and famous preachers of the religious orders. He had accepted the views of Luther, and in meetings which he used to hold at his house at Naples on Sundays for religious conversation he introduced them to his guests. Thus, and through books of his which are still prized as devotional classics, he exerted a wide influence in favor of spiritual and undogmatic religion. Fortunately for himself he died, universally lamented, in 1541, the year before the founding of the Italian Inquisition, which, had he lived much longer, would undoubtedly have called him to account. For while it is not correct to call him an Antitrinitarian, as has often been done, yet he carefully avoids the doctrine of the Trinity in his writings; and the tendency of his influence may be judged from the fact that several of those who fell under it became decidedly heretical on this point, as we shall see in this and later chapters.
Even more famous than Valdez, and of wider influence, was Bernardino Ochino. He was born at Siena in 1487, was of humble parentage and limited education, though of great natural talents, and was destined to be esteemed incomparably the best preacher in Italy. Seeking to save his soul by a more holy life, he entered the order of St. Francis in young manhood, and after twenty years becoming dissatisfied with the laxity of this he joined the yet stricter order of Capuchin Friars, in which he received the singular honor of being twice chosen Vicar General. The preaching of the Catholic Church was at that time done exclusively by the friars; and Ochino, now become celebrated for his eloquent preaching, drew immense crowds to hear his Lenten sermons at Venice and Naples, and was everywhere received with the greatest distinction, while at the same time revered almost as a saint for his self-denying and holy life. While thus preaching at Naples he was drawn within the circle of Valdez’s influence, and became deeply interested in the reformation of the Church, and in a religion which should lay much stress upon a devout and holy life, but little upon the doctrines of the Creeds. He was in a fair way, through his great influence over the people, to become the Luther of Italy, when the Inquisition resented his public criticism of its intolerant spirit, and summoned him to appear before it in Rome. Having received an intimation that his death was already determined upon, he fled from Italy in 1542 by way of the Grisons, and joined the Protestants beyond the Alps. In a later chapter we shall follow his career there, where late in life he was suspected of having become an Antitrinitarian. Meanwhile he left behind him in Italy an influence on many who soon had to flee like himself, of whom several are counted among the early Antitrinitarians.
A more tragic fate befell Aonio Paleario, who was born about 1500, embraced the scholar’s life, and became a professor at several of the Italian universities. He too became greatly interested in the reform of religion in much the same way as Valdez and Ochino, and though several times threatened with prosecution for heresy, he was defended by such powerful friends that he escaped. At length, however, the Inquisition laid its relentless hands upon him, and after three years’ imprisonment at an advanced old age, he was hanged, and his body burned, in 1570.
The cases of these three distinguished Italian Catholics who wished to reform the religion of their Church will serve to illustrate how in Italy the ground was being mellowed to receive the seeds of more radical thought. For if the first article of the Creeds could be passed over by these leaders as not vitally important to Christianity, the next step would be yet more easy: to reject it outright as not scriptural, or not reasonable, and hence as not true. This next step was soon taken, as we shall see, though not in Italy. For beginning with 1542 the Inquisition became ever more active in scenting out Protestant heresy and persecuting heretics. Whenever one of any importance was discovered, and was unwilling to renounce his faith, he had to flee the country in haste, as Ochino had done, lest he perish as Paleario did. So that during the next generation large numbers of Italian refugees emigrated to Switzerland or beyond, where they might both preserve their lives and keep their religious faith.
The nearest and most convenient place of refuge, to which most of them first fled, was the Grisons, which lay safely beyond the reach of the Inquisition, yet partly on the Italian side of the Alps, with the climate which Italians loved, and a language which they could understand. The Grisons at the time of the Reformation were a loose confederation, in the extreme southeast of Switzerland, of three leagues which had asserted their independence of other powers and in 1471 had joined together in a highly democratic republic, and had early in the sixteenth century come to include adjoining districts in Italy, to which in our time they again belong. It is a country of varied and beautiful scenery lying both north and south of the Alps, with narrow and secluded Alpine valleys and lofty snow peaks; and its valleys, passes, and towns are well known to travelers.
Numerous heretics in these remote valleys are said to have escaped the vigilance of the Church all through the Middle Ages; and the Reformation spread so rapidly here that in 1526 the Diet of Ilanz decreed equal religious freedom to Protestants and Catholics, and recognized the Scriptures as the only authority in religion, though at the same time it outlawed the Anabaptists, and ordained that heretics should be punished by banishment. The Grisons were thus at this time more advanced in religious toleration than any other country in Christian Europe.
Anabaptists expelled from Zurich had come here almost as soon as the Reformation itself, and the teachings of Denck spread with the rest, soon followed by those of Servetus; but the most active influences came from the Italian refugees. By 1550 more than two hundred of them, and by 1559 more than eight hundred, had passed this way, the number steadily rising as the Inquisition grew more severe. Their preachers, most of them formerly preachers of the religious orders who had been influenced by the teachings of Luther, were eagerly welcomed for the aid they could give in spreading the Reformation among the Italian population; and in an atmosphere of comparative freedom their religious thought developed so rapidly, that it was not long before some of them came quite to disbelieve doctrines which hitherto they had only ignored.
The first of these Italians to attract attention by his unorthodox teaching in the Grisons was an ex-monk, Francesco of Calabria, who had been one of the followers of Valdez, and who maintained that he was a disciple of Ochino. He was pastor of a church in the Lower Engadine where, along with certain Anabaptist doctrines and the denial of eternal punishment, he seemed to teach that Christ was inferior to God. The orthodox therefore complained of him, and although he was strongly supported by his own parish, he was convicted of heresy and banished from the country in 1544. Another ex-monk and disciple of Ochino, Girolamo Marliano, pastor of the neighboring church of Lavin, besides holding Anabaptist views also taught that the doctrine of the Trinity, as commonly held, is contradictory and absurd. He was therefore dismissed by his church, and later went to Basel.
A bolder step was taken by a mysterious traveling preacher who is known to us only by the name of Tiziano, and of whose origin and fate no memory survives. He had been in some cardinal’s court at Rome, had accepted the teachings of Luther, and had later become an Anabaptist. It was he that converted and re-baptized the priest Manelfi at Florence in 1548 or 1549, after which they together visited the brethren at Vicenza; and at the Anabaptist Council at Venice in 1550 he appeared as a delegate from some congregation in the Grisons, whither he had evidently had to flee from Italy. Besides his entertaining the usual Anabaptist views, his especial offense was that he considered Christ only an ordinary man, filled with the divine Spirit, but not miraculously born. These views he preached at many places in the Grisons, winning numerous followers. But the orthodox at length became so enraged against him that he was in imminent danger of being put to death, had not milder counsels prevailed. He was arrested, and after long refusal was finally brought by threats of death to sign a statement which had been prepared for him, explicitly renouncing his errors. His influence over his followers having thus been destroyed, he was flogged through the streets, and forever banished from the country in 1554.
But the widest and deepest influence is generally ascribed to one Camillo. He was a Sicilian scholar, who had been with Valdez at Naples; and after embracing the doctrines of the Reformation he assumed the name by which he is best known, Renato, by which he signified his feeling that he had been “born again.” A man of talents and fine education, he had a singular power of deeply influencing those whom he attracted to him. He was by nature serious, reserved, and shy; and his opponents regarded him as crafty and insidious in spreading his views. To escape the danger that threatened all Protestants, he fled from Italy in 1542 and came to the Valtellina, where he supported himself as tutor to the sons of prominent families. But although he was a teacher by occupation, his deepest interest was in questions of theology, which he seems to have taken every opportunity to discuss with his pupils and trusted friends.
Renato had imbibed Anabaptist views, and was one of the earliest Italian Anabaptists to exert much influence; he had also read Servetus. It may well have been he that converted Tiziano. Quite independently of the Creeds he had developed a simple system of belief which shows that he was much of a mystic. But though he was not orthodox as to the Atonement, and held that Christ inherited a sinful nature so that he at least could have sinned, yet he never let it be known, unless perhaps to his intimate friends, whether he believed in the doctrine of the Trinity or not. It is very noteworthy, however, that several of the most important of those that later spread antitrinitarian views north of the Alps had been in Renato’s circle in the Grisons; and his system of belief in several respects so closely resembles that afterwards taught by Socinians (Unitarians) in Poland, that it is hard not to trace these various results to his quiet influence as their source.
Renato left the Valtellina in 1545 for Chiavenna, the center of the Reformation in the Italian Grisons, where he soon acquired much influence, and where refugees fleeing into Switzerland were likely, if they remained long, to meet him and learn his views. Here he fell into a long and bitter controversy upon the Lord’s Supper (a subject very hotly debated among the early reformers), with the pastor of the Chiavenna church, in which he had won a large number of sympathizers. The end of the matter was that, having refused to refrain from spreading his views, he was excommunicated in 1550, and returned to the Valtellina. From now on we lose track of him, save that four years later he sent from here to Calvin an eloquent Latin poem of protest at the burning of Servetus, and in favor of religious toleration, and that he was yet living, though blind, until after 1560. He still kept up relations with his friends through correspondence, and his influence long persisted.
Among those to take Renato’s part and receive his influence was Francesco Stancaro, formerly a monk, and very famous as a Hebrew scholar. After turning Protestant he fled to the Grisons, whence he soon went on to Switzerland. Through his unorthodox teaching as to the Atonement he later did much, as we shall see, to prepare the way for Unitarianism in Poland and Transylvania.
The narrow mountain valleys of the Grisons were no place for men whose life had been spent in the society of large towns and the world of scholars. Most of the leaders therefore soon went on to the stirring centers of Geneva, Zurich, Basel, or Strassburg, where we shall hear more of some of them in connection with our history. Alone of those whom we have named, Renato remained behind; and even after we cease to hear of him directly the leaven of his teaching continued to work. But in 1570 the Diet voted to banish all Anabaptists and Arians; and when two notorious Antitrinitarians from Geneva returned in 1579 for a visit to the Grisons, they were ordered to leave the country.
Thus the antitrinitarian movement disappeared also from the Grisons, although it is most interesting to discover not only that nine of the old Protestant churches of that district still exist, with a numerous membership, but that more than half their pastors are decidedly liberal, preaching a Christianity which no longer insists upon creeds or believes in miracles. The teachings that were nourished there in the time of which we have spoken, however, were not destroyed by the persecution they received, but simply transplanted beyond the Alps. For it was as though the Grisons had been a hotbed for heresy, in which the seed thoughts planted in the minds of the Italian refugees might develop, protected from the harsh winds of persecution, until they were strong enough to be transplanted into the more vigorous atmosphere of northern Europe, where they were later to bear fruit. Under this figure, the tending and cultivating of the young plants until they were well rooted was largely the quiet work of Camillo Renato. Meantime the stage had been setting for another and more dramatic scene at Geneva, and we must therefore return to follow the later history and the tragic fate of Servetus.
Soon after the publication of his Dialogues on the Trinity in 1532, Servetus finding himself friendless, penniless, and in imminent danger of trial for heresy, left Basel and was no more heard of for twenty-one years. As Germany and Switzerland had grown too hot to hold him he next went to France, and in order the better to conceal himself he dropped his name of Servetus and adopted that of his early home, and thus became Michel de Villeneuve (Michael Villanovanus). We first find him in Paris, perhaps disheartened for a time over his failure as a religious reformer, and studying mathematics at the University for some two years, while he became so proficient that presently he was giving university lectures on the subject. In this period he met the young Calvin, who was now becoming prominent in the Reformation, and was later to bring him to the stake. He challenged Calvin to a public debate on religious subjects, and the meeting was arranged for; but in the end Servetus failed to appear. Why, we do not know, though he may well have shrunk from the danger involved in a city where every day heretics were being burned at the stake.
Want of money now forced him to interrupt his studies, and he therefore went to Lyon (Lyons), which ranked next to Paris as a publishing center, and here for over two years he was employed by a famous publishing house as corrector of proof, which was then a common occupation for scholars.
In this capacity Servetus served as editor of a new edition of Ptolemy's celebrated Geography, which the recent explorations in the New World had made necessary. This work was enriched by many pungent notes, and one of these, which spoke of Palestine as a very poor country for a "promised land," afterwards brought him into trouble as a defamer of Moses. His work on the proof of several medical works, however, opened to him a new field of interest, and brought him influential acquaintances in the medical world, so that having replenished his purse he returned to Paris and became a student of medicine.
Servetus remained in Paris about four years, studying under the most distinguished physicians and anatomists of the age. He won the praise of one of his masters as almost unrivalled in his knowledge of medicine, wrote a little book on digestion which was so popular that it ran through five editions in France and Italy, and at length he was graduated as Doctor of Medicine.1 In the course of his studies he made a discovery which renders him forever distinguished in the history of physiology. He discovered that it is through the lungs that the blood passes from the right to the left side of the heart. Yet he evidently did not appreciate the importance of the discovery, or else was pre-occupied with another theme, for he never referred to it at all except to use it as an incidental illustration in a theological work not published until fifteen years later; and since this work (as we shall see) never got into circulation, his great discovery remained buried and unknown for a century and a half, until long after Harvey and others had made the discovery again. At the solicitation of his friends Servetus gave public lectures at the University on geography and astrology, which were attended by large numbers.
Astrology was still in good repute, and the line was not sharply drawn between that and meteorology. Theologians like Melanchthon believed in it and practiced it, and kings and princes had their court astrologers whom they consulted before any important undertaking. In his lectures and in a published pamphlet on the subject, Servetus took occasion to make disrespectful remarks about the medical scholars of the time, charging them with ignorance for neglecting this important subject, and calling them a plague of the world. His colleagues in the faculty were furious, and had him haled before the Inquisitor on a charge of heresy. When he was acquitted of this, they prosecuted him before the Supreme Court for advocating the practice of divination, which was forbidden on pain of death by fire. The Court ordered Servetus to withdraw his pamphlet, to pay his colleagues more respect, and to cease lecturing on the subject. But he had now had enough of academic life, and so he left Paris and entered upon the practice of medicine.
There are rumors of his having wandered rather widely for a time, but at length he settled down at Charlieu, near Lyon, and for a year or so practiced his profession with such success as to arouse the envy of his competitors, who caused him to be assaulted one dark night as he went to visit a patient. He was now invited, however, by the Archbishop of Vienne, who had known him in Paris, to become his private physician and to occupy a dwelling in his own palace, and thus about 1540 he entered upon ten or twelve peaceful and happy years, the longest quiet period of his adventurous and troubled life, during which he acquired fame and fortune as a physician, and at the same time pursued the studies he loved. For in this period, along with his duties to the sick, to whom he showed great devotion during the plague of 1542, he continued to correct proof for various works, and brought out a new edition of Ptolemy which he softened down some of the notes that had given offense before, but above all edited a celebrated edition of the Bible. A Dominican monk, Sante Pagnino, had a few years before made a new translation of the Bible into Latin, which was highly esteemed for its excellence; and as he had now died, the publisher employed Servetus to edit a new edition, and to supply it with a preface and notes. In doing this he laid down some startling new principles of interpreting Scripture, and in applying them to the Psalms and Prophets he showed that many passages supposed to be predictions of Christ really refer in the first instance to the writer's own time though in their full meaning they may also look forward to Christ. He thus anticipated the modern higher criticism of the Old Testament by two-hundred and fifty years; but at the time these notes gave great offense, and the Catholics put them on their Index of forbidden books, while Calvin later made them the basis for a part of the charges which brought Servetus to his death.
It was perhaps this new study of the Bible that revived his old interest in theology, and the quiet and leisure of his life at Vienne now enabled him again to cultivate it. Enthusiastic dreamer that he was, he felt that the whole world might still be won to that view of Christianity which seemed to him so much more simple and scriptural than the one current in the churches; and though fifteen years ago he had failed with the Swiss and German reformers, Calvin had now come to the fore in Geneva, and was the most influential figure in the Protestant world. Servetus became obsessed with the idea that he might convert Calvin; and so, finding a go between in one Frellon, a publisher of Lyon for whom Servetus had done literary work and who knew them both, he opened correspondence by asking Calvin three questions as to Jesus the Son of God, the kingdom of Christ and regeneration, and baptism. The correspondence began on the plane of courtesy, but it soon degenerated into coarse abuse and invective. Servetus was writing with the purpose of showing Calvin his errors, and he begged him to give up as unscriptural his belief in that great and impossible monster of three beings in one, and talked down to him as to an inferior. Calvin had now so long been practically dictator at Geneva that he had come to expect respectful deference from all who approached him, and although always ready to teach was little inclined to be taught. His patience was soon at an end; and as he found Servetus greatly lacking in humility, after a few letters he broke off the correspondence, and in place of writing more he sent Servetus a copy of his Institutes to which he referred him as a true statement of the Christian faith. Servetus later returned this with offensive criticisms scribbled all over the margins. Calvin took this as a personal insult. "There is not a page," he said, "that he has left free from his vomit." Servetus continued for two years to pursue Calvin with letters, to the number of thirty, and did not scruple to call him a reprobate, a blasphemer, a Jew, a thief, and a robber. Calvin was equal to the occasion, and referred to Servetus's letters as the braying of an ass. Nothing daunted, Servetus then sent Calvin the manuscript of a book he had lately written, seeking thus again to draw him into argument over the views it expressed. Calvin read the manuscript, but refused to answer it, and paid no heed to Servetus's repeated requests for its return. Still hoping to convert Calvin, Servetus next offered to go to Geneva and discuss the questions with him in person, if only assured of safe conduct; but Calvin would give no pledge: instead he wrote to his friend Farel, pastor at Neuchatel, that if Servetus came, and his own influence amounted to anything, he would never allow him to get away alive. Having failed with Calvin, Servetus next tried to draw out his fellow reformers, Poupin, pastor at Geneva, and Viret, pastor at Lausanne. To the former he wrote, "In place of one God you have a three-headed Cerberus, in place of faith you have a fatal dream, and good deeds you call worthless picture"; and then, as if with a premonition of his fate, he added, "That I must die for this cause I know full well, but for all that I have good courage, if only I may become a disciple like the Master."
Having now failed in all quarters to make any impression, Servetus again felt driven to publish his views for wide reading, and he was the more strongly impelled to do this because he was convinced by a passage of Scripture2 that the kingdom of Antichrist (the Papacy) was to come to an end in 1585, and he had the conviction that he himself was the Michael who it was foretold was to put the great dragon under his feet. A Basel printer friend of his to whom Servetus offered the manuscript dared not print it, but at length after much difficulty, and by paying a large bonus, he got it printed in great secrecy in a vacant house in Vienne, of course with no indication of place, printer, or author; though he could not resist the temptation to put his own initials at the end, and to insert his name in several places in the text. This work was entitled The Restoration of Christianity (Christianismi Restitutio). About half of it consisted of a recast of Servetus's two earlier books on the Trinity, to which he now added his thirty letters to Calvin, and an address to Melanchthon, making in all a book of over 700 pages. It contains Servetus's plan for a more thorough and complete reformation of Christianity than the Protestant reformers had attempted. Though its thought is more developed, it does not essentially differ from the earlier works; but it is harsher than before, and while holding a position something between Catholics and Protestants it is especially bitter toward the reformers, while it violently attacks the traditional doctrine of the Trinity with every weapon to be drawn from reason, history, or Scripture. It is in this book that Servetus describes the circulation of the blood referred to above.
This work was printed early in 1553, a thousand copies of it. They were sent in bales to Lyon, where they were to be held until they could be put on sale at the Easter fairs there and at Frankfurt, the great book markets of northern Europe. Frellon, probably not foreseeing the consequences of his act, at once sent a copy to Calvin, who could easily see from a comparison of it with the manuscript which Servetus had sent him, that both were from the same author. It would never do to let such heresy be sown over Europe, to say nothing of the disrespect shown himself in the letters the book contained; and Calvin was quick to act. Now it happened that he had a neighbor and confidential friend, one Guillaume Trie, a Protestant refugee from Lyon, who was still in correspondence with a Catholic relative there. To him Calvin related what he knew of this new book and its author. Trie at once wrote to his Catholic relative (it is hard not to believe that this was done with Calvin's knowledge and approval, for he had himself previously denounced Servetus to the Archbishop of Lyon as a heretic), saying to him that there was a heretic in his vicinity who deserved to be burned alive for blaspheming the Trinity and uttering other dreadful heresies; that his name was Michael Servetus, though he now called himself Villeneuve; and that he was living at Vienne as a physician. To clinch the matter he enclosed the first four sheets of the Restitutio. It came out as Trie (and Calvin) desired. The letter soon reached the hands of the Inquisitor. Steps were cautiously taken, Servetus was summoned before the authorities and questioned, and his lodgings were searched. The printers were likewise examined; but no evidence could be found, and the accused were all discharged.
Trie was then written to for further proof of what he had charged, and he produced it nothing loath, Calvin assisting. He forwarded a number of letters which Servetus had written to Calvin and marked confidential, and the copy of the Institutes with Servetus's notes on the margin, and later on also the manuscript book which Servetus had sent Calvin some years before. The judges examined these, found the evidence convincing, and caused Servetus to be arrested and brought before them. After artfully leading him on through questions as to his former life and writings and meeting with some evasion, the judges at length laid before him the letters written in his own hand which he could not well deny, but signed Servetus, thus identifying the Dr. Michel de Villeneuve before them with the notorious heretic Michael Servetus. Realizing that he was cornered, and grasping at any straw that might save him from death, he made an artful equivocation, which, however, did not deceive his judges. Before the examination was concluded the court adjourned for the night. That evening Servetus sent his servant from the prison to collect a large sum of money owing to him, and the next morning at daybreak he made his escape from prison as was generally believed, not without connivance on the part of influential friends. When his escape was discovered, he was already well out of reach. The trial went on without him, and dragged on for ten weeks. The printers were discovered, and bales containing 500 copies of the book were found at Lyon. Servetus was found guilty of heresy and various related crimes, and was condemned to be burned to death by a slow fire, along with his books.
It was not the custom in those times to put off the execution of a capital sentence simply because the condemned could not be found. An effigy of Servetus was therefore made that very day, and after being first duly hanged, was burned, together with his books, in the public square, whereat perhaps every one was well enough satisfied save the Inquisitor and Calvin. The trial had been by the civil court. The ecclesiastical court now proceeded to do its duty in trying Servetus on its own account. Two days before Christmas it too found him guilty of heresy, and again ordered his books to be burned. But it was too late. Servetus had already met his fiery fate at Geneva two months before. How he came thither will be told in the next chapter.
Although escaped from his imprisonment at Vienne, Servetus found the world by no means a place in which he might feel free to go or be wherever he would. He dared not stay in France for fear of recapture. It was hardly more safe for him to return to the Rhine country whence he had fled years before, and where he might still be recognized. Still less could he think of returning to his native land in fanatical Spain. He therefore determined to go to Naples in order to practice his profession among his countrymen, of whom many had fled thither for the sake of enjoying greater religious liberty. He thought at first of crossing the Pyrenees and going through Spain, but danger of arrest on the border deterred him, and after wandering like a hunted thing for four months he at length turned to the route through Switzerland into northern Italy as the safest one for him. Fortunately for him, he was well provided with money.
Thus it was that Servetus at length arrived at an inn in Geneva one evening about the middle of August, intending as soon as possible to get a boat up the lake on his way to Zurich and Italy. He had meant to keep out of sight as much as possible, hoping thus to escape discovery; but unhappily for him the next day was Sunday, when the laws required every one to attend church, and he may indeed even have been curious to hear Calvin preach. Here he was recognized before ever the sermon began. Calvin felt that Servetus had long deserved death as a blasphemer and heretic, and he may have suspected that he had come in order to spread his heresies in Geneva itself, and thus to endanger the success of the Reformation there. He was the more keenly alive to this danger since he had but lately had a letter telling him how rapidly and widely the diabolical teachings of Servetus had spread in the cities of northern Italy. He therefore felt bound to do all in his power to rid the world of Servetus, now that the Inquisition at Vienne had failed of doing so, and he at once caused him to be arrested and thrown into prison. The law required that the accuser in such a case should be imprisoned with the accused until the charges were established, and since this would be inconvenient for himself Calvin got a student named Nicolas de la Fontaine, who was living in his household as his secretary, to enter the prison in his stead as the accuser.
Before proceeding to speak of the long trial that followed, it will be necessary for a clear understanding of it to say something of Calvin himself, and of conditions in Geneva at this time. John Calvin had been born in 1509, two years before Servetus, at Noyon in Picardie, and had been well educated and designed for the priesthood. Later falling out with the Church, he had, like Servetus, studied law; and he was becoming converted to the views of the Reformation at the very time when Servetus was publishing his first books against the Trinity. In 1536 he had published his Institutes of the Christian Religion, a clear, logical, and able presentation of the Protestant system of belief, much the strongest work yet written in defense of the Protestant cause; and this had at once caused him to be recognized as the intellectual leader of the Reformed religion outside Germany. Obliged to flee from France, where no Protestant’s life was quite safe, he had happened to come to Geneva at the very moment when the cause of the Reformation, which had been adopted earlier that year, hung trembling in the balance for want of a powerful leader. Quite against his inclination he was pressed into service there, and although never in name more than one of the city pastors and a preacher and teacher of theology, he soon became in fact, and by the force of his character, practically dictator.
Geneva in 1553 was a cosmopolitan little city of about 20,000 inhabitants. Before the Reformation it had been gay and dissolute, and even now its people were much given to pleasure, and none too strict in their morals. Calvin determined to change all this, and to make Geneva a model for the Protestant world, with its life strictly conformed to the Word of God. He soon brought order out of chaos, reformed the code of laws, and aimed by strict laws strictly enforced, even as to the small details of private life, to root out vice and make religion and good morals universal among the inhabitants. The Genevese, however, resenting that a mere foreigner should thus interfere with their old habits and customs, rose in indignant opposition, and after two years drove Calvin and his fellow reformer, Farel, into exile, forbidding them ever to return. Thereupon things drifted from bad to worse until after three years it was necessary to recall Calvin. He returned in 1541 to remain at Geneva for the rest of his life, ruling with a more absolute hand than ever, though not without great and persistent opposition. The Libertines (as the strong party opposed to Calvin came at a later time to be called) found him in the way of their political ambitions, and determined if possible to destroy his power. After he had caused one of their number to be beheaded in 1547 they became doubly infuriated against him. They insulted him in every way: named their dogs Calvin, and called him Cain. The struggle was hard and hot, and the outcome of it was long uncertain. After gaining some temporary victories over his opponents, Calvin had had to face renewed opposition, and in the summer of 1553 he seemed to be all but defeated. This was the critical state of things when Servetus arrived upon the scene, with the Libertines ready, if opportunity offered, to take any advantage of his presence in order further to thwart Calvin’s influence. The trial of Servetus was thus not merely a trial of an individual for heresy, but one in which political and personal interests were also deeply involved; and on its outcome seemed to depend not simply the life of the accused, but also the fate of the Reformation in Geneva, and perhaps even in all Switzerland and France.
On the day after his arrest Servetus was brought for preliminary examination before the proper authority, to whom de la Fontaine, his formal accuser, presented a complaint against Servetus, drawn up by Calvin under thirty-eight articles. These were based mainly on the Restitutio, and after charging that some twenty-four years ago Servetus had begun to trouble the churches with his heresies, and had since then continued his mischief by his notes on the Bible and on Ptolemy, and by a recent book full of infinite blasphemies, and that he was an escaped prisoner from Vienne; they went on to charge him with destroying the very foundations of Christianity by various heresies as to the Trinity, the person of Christ, the immortality of the soul, and infant baptism; and finally led up to the climax by charging that he had defamed Calvin by heaping all possible blasphemies upon him, and had concealed his scandalous views from the printer at Vienne. Some of these charges Servetus at once admitted as true, some he denied as false, and some he explained away; adding, however, that if in anything he had fallen into error he was willing to stand corrected. But on the whole the charges were held to be well taken, and it was ordered that he be held for trial.
On the following day trial was begun before the Little Council of Geneva, and conducted by the Prosecuting Attorney. Servetus being duly sworn was re-examined on the charges made the previous day. He now made his admissions and denials rather more distinct than before, but took a fling at Calvin by saying that it was no fault of his that he had not been burned alive at Vienne, and that he was ready before a full congregation to give Calvin the reasons and scripture proofs for his teachings. A little later one of Calvin’s most prominent supporters entered the case as counsel for the prosecution, while on the other hand one of his most active political opponents took a hand in defense of Servetus. This threatened to turn the case into a phase of the political struggle to overthrow Calvin, so that he now resolved to take no chances, but threw off the mask and came into court himself as openly the accuser, and assisted in the prosecution of the case. In the further examination of Servetus little new evidence was brought out, save that Servetus had applied to those that believed in the orthodox doctrine of the Trinity the term Trinitarians,1 at which Calvin took the greatest offense. The prosecution now maintained that the charges against Servetus had been sufficiently proved to show him a criminal, and asked that de la Fontaine be discharged from his imprisonment as accuser, and this was granted. The Attorney General therefore took charge of the prosecution in the name of the State, and opened a new stage of the trial by bringing in an entirely new indictment; while Calvin soon retired again into the background, though from the pulpit he appealed to public feeling by making bitter attacks against Servetus. Meanwhile it had been voted to request the authorities at Vienne to send a copy of the evidence they had against Servetus, and then to lay the case before the other churches of Switzerland for their information.
Now that the regular state trial was about to commence, Servetus came before the court with a motion that he be discharged. His grounds were that it was not the custom of the Apostles nor of the first Christian Emperors to treat heretics as guilty of capital crime, but only to excommunicate or at the most banish them; that he had committed no crime either in their territory or elsewhere; that the questions he had treated were only for scholars, and he had never spoken of them to others; that as for the Anabaptists, with whom they had sought to identify him as a person dangerous to public order, he had always disapproved of them; and finally, since he was a stranger and ignorant of the customs of the land and of the forms of legal procedure, he asked for legal counsel to conduct his case for him.
The items in the new indictment touched but lightly on the doctrinal matters which had been so prominent in the original charges, but instead were designed to show that Servetus had long been spreading doctrines opposed to Christianity as commonly received, and had led a criminal and immoral life; that his very teaching led to immorality and favored other religions; that his doctrines were those of heretics long ago condemned; and that he had come to Geneva in order to disturb that city with them. When he was examined, Servetus’s answers to these questions were so frank and clear that he must have created a very favorable impression upon his judges. The Attorney General, however, apparently coached by Calvin, at once sought to counteract this impression by taking up Servetus’s petition of a few days before and arguing that all the reasons urged for his discharge were unsupported by fact; that it was therefore evident that Servetus was one of the most audacious, rash, and dangerous heretics that had ever lived, since he wished to have the very laws annulled under which heretics might be punished; that his Anabaptist teachings were the least of his errors; that in his testimony he had lied and contradicted himself; that it had never been heard of that such criminals should be represented by counsel;2 and moreover that he was so clearly guilty that he needed no attorney. His request was therefore denied, and the trial went on to further examination of the prisoner.
In due time a reply was received from the authorities at Vienne, sending a copy of the sentence there passed against Servetus, but claiming jurisdiction over him as an escaped prisoner for crimes committed in their territory, and therefore asking that he be returned to them for punishment. They also begged to be excused from forwarding evidence for anyone else to try him on. Upon being asked whether he chose to be tried here or to be sent back to Vienne, Servetus threw himself upon the ground and begged them with tears not to send him back, but to try him here and do with him as they would. This fell in well with the ideas of Calvin and his friends, for if the heretic were to be burned at all they wished the credit of it, in order to prove that Protestants were not less zealous than Catholics to preserve the purity of the Christian faith. They therefore politely declined to grant the request from Vienne, though they promised that justice should be done.
When the heretical teachings of Servetus next came up for discussion, it was felt that the discussion might take up too much time if carried on in court, and besides the subject was one too intricate for the judges to pass upon. It was therefore agreed that the necessary books should be furnished Servetus in prison, and that he and Calvin should discuss in writing the points at issue between them. The papers thus written, together with the rest of the documents in the case, were then to be submitted to the Swiss churches for their advice as to what to do; though this reference of the case can have been little to Calvin’s liking, and may even have been proposed by his enemies in order to foil him; for two years before, when Bolsec was on trial for opposing Calvin’s teaching on predestination, and Calvin wished that he, too, might be condemned to death, a similar appeal had resulted in Bolsec’s favor.
Now it happened that on the very morning of the day that the Council ordered the written discussion between Calvin and Servetus, Calvin’s enemies had scored a notable point against him in the Council. This seems to have elated Servetus with the belief that he should certainly win his case, and to have bred in him a false sense of security. The written discussion lasted four days. In the name of the Geneva ministers Calvin first drew up a collection of thirty-eight extracts from the books of Servetus, which he offered as “partly impious blasphemies, partly profane and insane errors, and all wholly foreign to the Word of God and the orthodox faith.” These were submitted on their face and without comment. Servetus replied explaining and justifying his positions. Calvin wrote in refutation, and Servetus ended by merely penciling brief notes between the lines or on the margin of Calvin’s manuscript. The discussion began on a fairly dignified plane, but Servetus, regarding Calvin as already defeated, soon lost his head, and at length abandoning argument fell into violent abuse and invective, much to the prejudice of his case. Calvin on the contrary kept his poise, and correspondingly strengthened his case. The papers were then submitted to the Council, and were duly forwarded to the churches and Councils of Zurich, Bern, Basel, and Schaffhausen, while Calvin had anticipated this step by writing to the several pastors in order to prepossess them against Servetus.
It was four weeks before the answers were received, and all this time Servetus was languishing in prison. He addressed to the Council an indignant appeal. Calvin, he said, was at the end of his rope, and was keeping him there for spite. Vermin were eating him alive, his clothes were in rags, and he had no change of garments. He again demanded counsel, and appealed his case to the Council of Two Hundred. The leader of the opposition to Calvin supported his appeal, but nothing came of it. A week later Servetus, still sure of his cause, demanded that Calvin himself be imprisoned as a false accuser, on pain of death if found guilty, and he brought six charges against him. This request was ignored like the rest. Finally, after waiting more than three weeks, he again made a pitiful appeal for the clothes he needed, being now ill and suffering from the cold; and this request was at last granted.
The replies from the churches at length arrived. The Councils had with one accord referred the matter to their pastors, and the latter, though expressing themselves in differing terms and in guarded language, urged that Servetus was plainly guilty, and that all due means ought to be used to rid the churches of him, especially lest they get a bad reputation for harboring heretics. In the face of such unanimous advice there was but one action to be taken, and after a few days’ delay it was voted that Servetus be condemned to be taken to the suburb of Champel and there be burned alive the following day, together with his books. Burning had for centuries been the penalty for heresy under the law of the Empire, and when Calvin revised the laws at Geneva he had let this law stand unchanged. In the present case he tried to get beheading substituted for burning, but the matter had passed beyond his control. When the sentence was announced to Servetus he broke down completely, for he had expected acquittal, or at the worst only banishment; but he soon regained composure, sent for Calvin, and begged his forgiveness. Farel, minister at Neuchatel, had that morning arrived at Calvin’s desire. He tried to get Servetus to renounce his errors and thus save his life. But Servetus remained true to his convictions, only begging for another form of death, lest the suffering at the stake cause him at last weakly to recant. Farel accompanied him to the place of execution, where a large crowd had gathered, and there he died with a prayer upon his lips (October 27, 1553); but the details are too horrible to be related here.
Even during the trial of Servetus a few voices had been raised in his behalf, one of them that of an Italian jurist, Gribaldo, who was in Geneva at the time, and of whom we shall hear more in the next chapter; while David Joris wrote from Basel to the governments of the Protestant cities of Switzerland urging them to avert his fate. But only the Anabaptists as yet disapproved the repression of heresy by force; and anything that Erasmus, Luther, Zwingli, or Calvin might earlier have said in favor of the milder treatment of heretics, or that had this very year been urged by Calvin in behalf of five young Protestants from Lausanne on trial for their life before the Inquisition at Lyon, was assiduously forgotten. The leading reformers without exception strongly approved the execution of Servetus, and Melanchthon called it “a pious example, which deserved to be remembered to all posterity.” Calvin himself never expressed the slightest regret for it; but Catholics did not forget, and for generations afterwards whenever Protestants complained of Catholic treatment of Protestant heretics, they retorted by pointing to Calvin’s treatment of Servetus.
Servetus’s ashes were not cold before there began a general revulsion of public feeling over the affair, and a bitter indignation against Calvin for his part in it. The Council at once dismissed the charges pending against the printer of the Restitutio, who had fallen into their hands. Calvin was naturally the object of the bitterest attacks, even in Geneva: “the dogs are now barking at me on all sides,” he wrote; and in Protestant Basel he was said to be detested almost more than in Catholic Paris. Within two months from Servetus’s death, Calvin was driven almost to the point of leaving Geneva. Forced to defend himself, he published early the next year a Defense of the Orthodox Faith on the Holy Trinity, against the Prodigious Errors of Michael Servetus,4 in which after defending the capital punishment of heretics on general grounds he undertook to set forth Servetus in the most odious light. This did nothing to raise Calvin in general esteem, and it was soon far more than offset by an anonymous work on the punishment of heretics, a noble plea for tolerance generally attributed to Chatillon (Castellio), who some years before had had friction with Calvin at Geneva and was now at Basel; while this in turn was followed by an answer from Calvin’s admiring friend Beza. In fact, by these and other writings, the whole question of the punishment or the toleration of hereties was now opened for discussion, and with the most salutary result. For while heretics were for a long time still occasionally put to death in Protestant countries, from this time forth opposition to the practice steadily increased. Thus it may be said that if the writings of Servetus had a great and lasting influence toward undermining belief in the Athanasian doctrine of the Trinity, his death had a yet more important influence in opening the way for religious liberty of thought and speech.
In judging this whole affair one must take care not to be unjust toward Calvin, by being as narrow and unsympathetic toward him as he was toward Servetus. For he deserves to be judged by the standards of his own age rather than of ours, even though we condemn those in comparison with our own. Besides being a man of extraordinary ability, he had many of the finest traits of personal character. He has been called the father of popular education and the inventor of free schools. Protestantism owes him more than any other man after Luther, and for more than three centuries he remained the leader of its thought outside the Lutheran churches. But he took his office very seriously, and so wholly identified himself with his cause that he took attacks upon himself as equivalent to attacks upon the Christian religion; and when one had seemed to him to commit an offense against the honor of God, or to endanger the salvation of immortal souls, he would never forgive nor make allowances, but would pursue his opponent vindictively, relentlessly, and without pity. This should help us to explain, if not to excuse, his attitude toward Servetus, and even his willingness so treacherously to betray him to the authorities at Vienne.
Servetus, on the other hand, was in controversy self-conceited, obstinate, fanatical, insulting, and exasperating to the last degree, and by his own manner brought upon himself no small part of what he suffered.5 Though a man of brilliant and versatile talents, he held, along with the most advanced ideas, others that bordered on the superstitious and made some think him half mad. Yet at bottom he was a sincere and reverent Christian, prizing the Bible far above all other books, devoutly attached to Jesus, who to him was all in all, and willing for the sake of what he held true to be faithful even unto death. Three centuries and a half have squared accounts between him and Calvin. Persecution has been condemned and toleration vindicated. Servetus’s heresy has steadily gained upon Calvin’s orthodoxy until at Geneva itself Calvin’s creed has long since been laid aside, and an expiatory monument has been erected by Calvin’s followers near the spot where Servetus perished; while in four cities of Europe where in 1553 he would not have been permitted to live, statues of him now stand to honor his memory.
It might naturally be supposed that after the execution of Servetus opposition to the doctrine of the Trinity would have been at an end in Switzerland, or at all events at Geneva, and that any still entertaining doubts of that doctrine would have kept them profoundly to themselves. Such did not at all prove to be the case. Calvin and his sympathizers soon discovered that they had only “scotched the snake, not killed it.” There was, as we have seen, a growing sentiment in favor of religious toleration, and the death of Servetus had without doubt caused persons of independent mind to inquire more widely and deeply than before whether the doctrine of the Trinity were true or not; and of all places it was right at Geneva itself, under Calvin’s very nose, that while the ashes of Servetus were still warm the discussion again broke out.
This new outbreak took place among the Italian refugees, who were somewhat protected from Calvin’s observation by the fact that they formed a community more or less separate from the native Genevese, and that they spoke a foreign tongue. When Ochino escaped from Italy to Geneva in 1542 he found already there a considerable number of his countrymen, refugees who had been kindly received by Calvin, and he preached to them in Italian until he left Geneva in 1545. The sermons were followed by free discussion on the part of the members, and this must have opened dangerous opportunities for any heretic to express his mind. A few years later an Italian church was regularly organized. Though most of its members were strictly orthodox, some of them were inclined to be liberal; and during and after the trial of Servetus several of them leaned to his side and denounced his execution. These latter were of course cautious about expressing their views too openly; but they did not conceal them when in conversation with trusted friends. Their general objection to the doctrine of the Trinity was that it was incomprehensible and unreasonable, and that it was self-contradictory. There were four persons who were prominent above the others in this movement, Gribaldo, Biandrata, Alciati, and Gentile; and we shall have separately to see what they did and what befell them.
Matteo Gribaldo was regarded by Calvin as the source of the heresies in the Italian church at Geneva. He was a native of Piedmont, and of his early life nothing is known; but in mature life he was a noted jurist, who lectured upon law at various universities of France and Italy, and especially at the University of Padua. Though he embraced the doctrines of the Reformation, he managed for some years to keep them to himself enough to escape the eye of the Inquisition. At length in 1555 he found the heresy-hunters on his trail, and resisting every inducement of honor and distinction offered him if he would only conform to the Church, he gave up his profession at Padua and withdrew to Switzerland, where he had some years before purchased an estate at Farges near Geneva, which be had often visited in the summers. He was at Geneva, as we have seen, while the trial of Servetus was in progress, and had then frankly expressed his disapproval of capital punishment for heresy, and had in vain sought an interview on the subject with which the latter, suspicious of Gribaldo’s orthodoxy, declined. Being at Geneva again the following summer, at the Italian church he expressed his views as to the Trinity so freely as to cause no little offense, for it was clear that he was practically an Arian.
Upon his withdrawal from Padua, a year later, Gribaldo had no sooner arrived in Switzerland than he was invited to the chair of law at the University of Tubingen. On his way thither he again visited his friends at Geneva, and this time it was Calvin who sought a conference with him in the presence of some of the church officers; but when Calvin refused to shake hands with him, as a man under suspicion of heresy, Professor Gribaldo at once left the room in anger. He was required, however, to make a statement of his views before the Council, and in this, despite his care not to compromise himself, he let fall some words which were construed as heretical. Enough. He was forthwith expelled from the city.
Upon going to Tubingen he was received with great distinction; but the relentless Calvin pursued him thither, warning one of his colleagues against him as a conceited and dangerous enemy of the faith, and Beza did the same. Complaint was made to his ruler, the Duke of Wirttemberg, and Gribaldo was brought to answer for his errors before the university senate. He asked for three weeks in which to prepare his answer, but used the time to make good his escape. He fled to his home at Farges, but the Duke got the authorities of Bern, in whose territory it lay, to arrest him. At length, as the less of two evils, he consented to subscribe an orthodox creed and abjure his errors, after which he was required to leave the city within half a year. Meanwhile his wife died, and he besought the government to allow him to remain with his seven motherless children. , The request was grantes, on condition that he keep quiet. A year or two later he was lecturing again at Grenoble, but it was only a short time before religious persecution drove him also from here; and after a few more troubled years he was carried off by the plague at Farges in 1564, the same year in which Calvin also died.
While Gribaldo had been only an occasional and brief visitor at Geneva, Biandrata, Alciati, and Gentile were residents there and members of the Italian church. They agreed substantially with Gribaldo and with one another in holding that the doctrine of the Trinity accords with neither Scripture nor reason, and they seem to have derived their views from Servetus. Of these three the one by far the most distinguished in the history of Unitarianism was Dr. Giorgio Biandrata.1 He was born of noble family at Saluzzo in Piedmont about 1515, studied medicine and taught it at the Universities of Montpellier and Pavia, and was renowned as one of the best medical writers of his time. While yet a comparatively young man, his reputation was such that he was chosen court physician to the Italian Queen Bona Sforza of Poland, and later served her daughter, Princess Isabella of Transylvania, in the same capacity. He was a very clever and crafty man, and won great personal influence at both courts.
Returning from Poland to Italy in 1551 he practiced his profession for a time at Pavia, and later on in the Grisons he met Renato.2 But having become infected with the ideas of the Reformation he had in 1556 to flee from the Inquisition, and came to Geneva where he joined the Italian church and for a time lived quietly. The discussion then in progress as to the Trinity seemed to trouble him, and he often resorted to Calvin for light. He would come away each time apparently satisfied, only to return later with new questions. At last Calvin’s patience was out, and half suspecting the sincerity of Biandrata’s questions he refused to have anything more to do with him. This suspicion was probably justified; for after Gribaldo had been banished, Biandrata and Alciati assumed leadership in the attacks upon the doctrine of the Trinity. So many members of the Italian church became dangerously infected that the pastor on his deathbed in 1557 implored Calvin to take the matter in hand and root out the heresy. Calvin willingly complied, and the next year, after other attempts had proved ineffectual, a very strict confession of faith was drawn up, directed especially against these errors; and after lengthy discussion, in which Biandrata and Alciati passionately opposed the Trinity, it was voted to require all the members to sign the confession and to promise to adhere strictly to it in future. Six of the members refused to sign but afterwards yielded, Alciati and Biandrata apparently among them; they continued nevertheless secretly to discuss the matter with susceptible persons, and hence they together with others were ere long called before the officers of the church. They were promised immunity from punishment if they would only preserve the peace; but soon afterwards Biandrata, scenting immediate danger, took hasty flight, going first to Gribaldo at Farges and then to Zurich, where he found so little sympathy that he was advised to leave the city. He therefore returned to practice his profession in Poland; and we shall later see how he became practically the founder of the Unitarian movement in that country and in Transylvania.
Giovanni Paolo Alciati, Biandrata’s companion in this controversy, was another Piedmontese of noble birth, who had formerly been a soldier in the service of Milan. Before coming to Geneva he had been in the Grisons with Biandrata and Renato, and had also been a correspondent of Paleario. He was rude of speech, and in the discussion referred to above he declared that in the Trinity Calvin worshiped three devils, worse than all the idols of the Papacy. He was about to be arrested when he fled with Biandrata, and when bidden to return he declared he would not set foot in Geneva so long as Calvin lived. He was therefore deprived of his citizenship, and permanently banished from Geneva under pain of death. Two others were also banished at about the same time. Alciati soon joined Biandrata in Poland and assisted him in spreading antitrinitarian views there, and was later active in the same cause in Moravia. The end of his life was spent at Danzig, which became one of the seats of Antitrinitarianism in Prussian Poland, where he was its first recorded adherent.
One more of the Geneva Antitrinitarians remains to be mentioned, Giovanni Valentino Gentile, whom Beza considered the fountainhead of all the disturbances in the Geneva church, and who for his adventurous life and tragic death deserves to be considered as second only to Servetus among Unitarian martyrs. He was a native of Calabria and was well educated, and had formerly been a teacher. He too had been in the circle of Valdez at Naples. Becoming too much of a Protestant to remain safely in Italy, he came to Geneva about 1556, attracted by the reputation of Calvin, and here became more and more inclined to the antitrinitarian faction in the church. He was one of the six that at first refused to sign Calvin’s creed, and were later persuaded to do so; but after Biandrata’s flight from Geneva, Gentile felt driven by his conscience boldly to bear witness to the truth of God as he saw it. He therefore made no secret of his opinion that Calvin’s doctrine really made a Quaternity of four divine beings, instead of a Trinity of three, and showed that he was himself fundamentally an Arian. The Council took his case in hand, required a formal statement of his beliefs, imprisoned him, denied him (like Servetus) legal counsel, and finally declared him worthy of death as a heretic. It was not until he had been condemned to be beheaded (Geneva was not likely now to invite further criticism by burning another heretic at the stake, and even this sentence of Gentile aroused general indignation) that he saw that if he would live he must unequivocally renounce all his errors. Having at length done this he was recommended to the mercy of his judges. He was therefore required to undergo a humiliating form of punishment in vogue at the time and known as the amende honorable: he was obliged barefoot and bareheaded, clad only in a shirt, and preceded by trumpeters, to march through the streets with lighted torch in hand, and then on his knees to confess his crime, burn his writings with his own hand, and beg the forgiveness of the magistrates; and he had to take oath not to leave the city without permission.
At the first opportunity he broke the oath thus forced from him, and fled to Gribaldo at Farges, and soon after that to Lyon, where he published an Antidota to Calvin’s doctrine, which he attacked without reserve as fantastic and sophistical. Ill health and his poverty soon caused him to go to Grenoble to seek the hospitality of Gribaldo who was now lecturing there. Being soon called to account by the Catholic authorities here, he proved to them that his attacks had been made only against Calvin and the Reformed Church, wheraet they were so well pleased that they let him go. He thought it safer however to return to Farges, where he was soon arrested and imprisoned again, though upon giving his promise to remain quiet he was set at liberty. Returning to Lyon he published another writing attacking the doctrine of Calvin, was again arrested on suspicion of heresy, and again satisfied the Catholic authorities that his opposition was rather against Calvin than against the doctrine of the Trinity (which was probably more than half the truth), and after fifty days’ imprisonment was once more set free. After all these troubles he was ready to accept the invitation of Biandrata to come to Poland and help him spread Antitrinitarianism there, and thither he went in 1563 together with Alciati.
The poor man could nowhere long escape persecution. Calvin at once wrote letters warning the Polish churches against him, and in 1566 a severe edict against heretics was passed which made it necessary for him to flee to Moravia. Here he sought an Anabaptist community in which many Antitrinitarians during this period found refuge, but he did not remain long. Whether he was fatally attracted to danger as a moth to flame, or whether he thought that with Calvin now dead, and several of the other leading reformers lately carried off by the plague which in Switzerland had swept away some 38,000, he might now with better success proclaim the doctrine he had so much at heart, he returned again to Farges, only to find that his friend Gribaldo had died of the plague.
With almost fanatical self-confidence Gentile now challenged all the Protestant theologians of France and Savoy to a public debate on the doctrine of the Trinity, the loser to be punished by death! The challenge was ignored, but again, and for the last time, he was arrested as a heretic. He claimed in defense that he had not attacked the true scriptural Trinity, but only the false Trinity of Calvin. After five weeks in prison at Gex he was removed to the seat of government at Bern. Feeling was very tense there on account of a recent outbreak of Anabaptism, and Gentile was suspected of being also an Anabaptist. Various churches and universities in Germany had already publicly condemned his teachings as Arian. Beza, who had now succeeded Calvin in Geneva, wrote to urge action against him, and the reformers of Bern and Zurich did the same. He was charged with seven specific errors as to the Trinity, and confessed them all, but defended them as the truth. He was charged also with disrespect for sacred things, and with having violated his oath at Geneva. After a month’s time, as he could not be brought to renounce his errors, he was condemned to be beheaded. Even on his way to execution he charged the clergy who attended him with being Sabellians, and declared that he died (1566) as a witness to the honor of the most high God. But so thoroughly had all open sympathy with the doctrines of Servetus now been suppressed in Switzerland, that hardly a voice was raised in protest save at Basel; and even there it was perhaps as much because political feeling was then strained between Basel and the rest of Switzerland as because of any strong sentiment in favor of religious toleration; for it will be remembered that it was at Basel that only a few years before this the body of David Joris had been taken from its grave and burnt.
Thus in this part of Switzerland, as in the other countries of which we have spoken, Antitrinitarianism was violently put down, and nothing more was heard of it for many generations for in the same year in which Gentile perished, most of the Swiss Protestant churches adopted the Helvetic Confession which ere long was also adopted by the Reformed Churches of France, Hungary, and Poland; and thus these churches were henceforth committed to a strict and unchanging form of religious thought much as the early Christian Church had been at Constantinople in 381. There had been, however, during this same period, a milder struggle for freedom of belief going on in other Swiss cities than Geneva and Bern, and we must therefore next follow the story of that at Zurich and at Basel.
Geneva was not the only Swiss city where there were Italian refugees, or where there were seeds of heresy trying to sprout. Zurich, the home of Zwingli, who had founded the Reformation in Switzerland, had long been a favorite refuge for Italian Protestants, when in 1555 their number was suddenly increased by a whole congregation at once. There had been a flourishing young Protestant church at Locarno in Italian Switzerland; and when the Catholic government there at length required them either to give up their faith or to leave the city, they unhesitatingly decided to do the latter. A few of them stopped in the Grisons, where they were made welcome; but the most of them, some six or eight score, went at once to Zurich, where they were hospitably received, were granted a church of their own for Italian worship, and were aided from public funds. Now it happened that just as they were looking for a minister Ochino was nearby at Basel, and the Locarno church thought themselves most happy when he accepted their unanimous call.
We last took leave of Ochino at Geneva in 1545. Since then he had had a varied and interesting life. From Geneva he had gone to Augsburg where for two years he preached to an Italian congregation. When it became unsafe under a Catholic government for him longer to stay there, he went to England, at the urgent invitation of Archbishop Cranmer, and for nearly six years preached to an Italian congregation in London. All this time he was on the one hand publishing volumes of sermons to be circulated in his dear Italy, where he might no longer preach in person, and was on the other hand becoming acquainted with distinguished Protestants, among them Princess (later Queen) Elizabeth, to whom he dedicated one of his books. But the accession of the Catholic Queen Mary made it necessary for him to leave England, and he returned to Switzerland, arriving at Geneva, so the tradition runs, on the very day after the execution of Servetus. After a brief visit to Chiavenna, and about a year’s residence at Basel, he was called to Zurich, as said above.
Ochino was now sixty-eight years old, and deserved a life of quiet retirement; but he accepted his call to new labors without hesitation. For eight years he discharged his office faithfully and with energy, and was held in universal esteem. Although it is possible to imagine in some of his writings before now a faint tinge of heresy, his orthodoxy had never been called in question by Protestants. But in 1563 he published two volumes of Dialogues, which soon brought him into trouble, for one of them was interpreted as arguing in favor of polygamy. This was then a tender subject in the Protestant world, for one of the Protestant princes, Philip of Hesse, had some years previously contracted a polygamous marriage, and had been defended by Luther for it; whereupon Catholics had taken advantage of the situation by calling attention to the demoralizing effects of the Protestant religion.
The Protestant government of Zurich did not propose to bear the weight of another such scandal. Without having granted him even a trial, the magistrates condemned Ochino to banishment within three weeks. At the edge of winter, and at the age of seventy-six, with his four motherless children, he was obliged to set forth. Refused residence at Basel and also at Mühlhausen, he was permitted to stay the winter out at Nuremberg, though forbidden to remain there longer. In May he arrived in Poland, where he already had numerous friends and correspondents. Here at least he had hoped to be unmolested, and he commenced preaching to an Italian congregation in the capital, at Krakow. But the Catholics had never forgiven their most distinguished preacher for leaving the Church. Within three months they secured from a compliant government a decree that all foreign preachers who were spreading the Protestant religion should leave the country. The decree was aimed especially at Ochino — in fact, he is said to have been the only one to whom it was applied at the time. Nobles interceded for him in vain. Before he could leave he was stricken down with the plague. Three of his four children died of it. With his one remaining daughter he was finally able late in the year to travel. One refuge still remained when all others had failed. It was among the Anabaptists of Moravia. Thither he turned his faltering steps, and having reached them he died within three weeks at Slavkov (Austerlitz), in his seventy-eighth year.
In the winter after he was driven from Zurich, Ochino prepared an apology to the ministers of that city, in which he defended himself and attacked them. They replied with A Sponge to Wipe out the Aspersions Cast by Ochino, in which they ransacked his writings for materials to justify their treatment of him; and it was not until now that it occurred to them to charge him with unsoundness as to the Trinity. Two of his Dialogues had been on that subject; and in those, although he appeared to be defending the doctrine, the arguments which he put into the mouth of the attack were so much stronger than those that he put into the mouth of the defense, that there certainly was some color in the charge that he really meant by this means to undermine a doctrine in which he no longer much believed. He was unsound also on the doctrine of the atonement. At all events, he had expressed strong disapproval of the execution of Servetus; at Zurich he had been intimate with Lelius Socinus, whose part in the movement we have next to notice; and we find him in Poland associating with the party which was rapidly developing antitrinitarian views there, and taking part in one of their synods; while it was with the antitrinitarian Paruta1 that he found his last refuge in Moravia. For these reasons his name seems to belong in the history of this movement, in which his writings had important influence.
Lelius Socinus (Lelio Sozini) is one whose name has shone by reflected light from his far more famous nephew Faustus, of whom we shall hear much in connection with the Unitarian movement in Poland. He was born at Siena in 1525, of a family of very distinguished jurists, and connected by family ties with one of the Popes. He was educated in law at Padua and Bologna, and early went over to the Reformation. He was for a time at Venice, though no good evidence is extant that, as is sometimes alleged, he belonged to the antitrinitarian movement there. In 1547 he came to Chiavenna and met Renato, who apparently had a profound influence on the development of the young man’s thought. He next spent some time in travel in the Protestant lands of northern Europe — Switzerland, France, England, Holland, and Germant. Everywhere his family name and his attractive manner and character won him friends among the distinguished, and he enjoyed the friendship and received the praise of Calvin, Melanchthon, and other leading reformers. He was apparently trying to reorganize his religious thought, and wherever he went was full of questions about points of doctrine; but although these at times aroused misgivings as to whether he was not becoming tinged with heresy, he never wholly lost the confidence of even Calvin.
In 1549, after further travels to Poland, Moravia, and Italy, he returned to Switzerland and finally settled down at Zurich as the safest place for a man of inquiring mind; for during his absence in Italy Servetus had been put to death at Geneva, and of this Socinus so strongly disapproved that he was suspected of being the author of the bitter attack which was soon afterwards made against Calvin.2 After a time complaints began to reach Zurich that Socinus was heretical as to the Trinity, and he was therefore called to account. Yet he had been regarded as orthodox enough to be chosen one of the elders of the Italian church when it arrived from Locarno, and had been one of the two chosen to take to Basel its invitation to Ochino, whom he had previously met in England; and he now gave a satisfactory explanation of his views, and wrote out a confession of his faith which was accepted. Henceforth, however, he became more and more reserved in expressing his views, save to trusted Italian friends; and although his doubts as to the received creeds are likely to have strengthened rather than grown weaker, yet he gave no open ground for complaint. When in 1562 he died at the early age of thirty-seven, his papers fell to his nephew, Faustus, and the latter, adopting and expanding the ideas he had found in these, became some twenty years later the leader of the Unitarians in Poland, and the author of their system of doctrine. It is thus that Lelius Socinus has sometimes been called “the patriarch of Socinianism,” though so far as we can now discover his influence upon it has been greatly overestimated.
Another member of the Zurich church, however, who was less guarded in expressing his views than Socinus and Ochino had been, was Antonio Maria Besozzo, a Milanese gentleman and teacher who had joined himself to the exiles from Locarno, and had been a close friend of Socinus. Some heresy hunters lit upon some things he had said in conversation, magnified them, and laid the matter before the Council. He was judged guilty of the heresies of Servetus and Ochino, and, being permanently banished from the place, together with his wife he withdrew to Basel in 1565. This was the end of Antitrinitarianism at Zurich.
At Basel, the other Swiss town of which we have to speak, there was no separate Italian church, though a notable company of Italians of liberal mind found a home in the church of the Protestants. Basel was the chief home of scholarship in Switzerland, and the best scholars of Europe resorted thither; interested, after the manner of scholars, not so much in particular doctrines as in general liberty of thought and conscience. Erasmus had left his liberalizing spirit behind him here, and the press was uncommonly free. Here Servetus had at first found sympathy; Ochino had lived here; Faustus Socinus had here spent four important years of his life; David Joris had found Basel the most tolerant place to which to flee from persecution, and from here had written his noteworthy letter urging that Servetus’s life be spared. It was also here that Chatillon in the year after Servetus’s death wrote his stinging inquiry as to whether heretics were to be put to death; and here that Mino Celso in 1577 raised another powerful voice against persecution. The principle of perfect freedom of belief in religion is an even more important mark of Unitarianism than is any particular doctrine; Basel therefore deserves to be remembered in this history because it was at this period the place above all others where religious toleration was most strongly advocated.
Besides those named above, whose influence (much to Calvin’s disgust) made Basel more hospitable to freedom of religious thought than were the other Swiss cities, one other person may have special mention. Celio Secondo Curione was born of noble family in Piedmont in 1503, the youngest of a family of twenty-four children, and was early left an orphan. He was educated at the University of Turin, and as one of the disciples of Valdez became attached to the doctrines of the Reformation. After teaching for some time at the universities of Pavia and Lucca he fell under the eye of the Inquisition in 1512 and fled the country, spending some time in the Grisons with Renato on his way to Switzerland, where he soon became Rector of the University of Lausanne. Later on as Professor of Eloquence at Basel he attracted large numbers of students, and until his death in 1569 was admired as one of the most learned of the Italian refugees. As early as 1549 he published a work on Christian doctrine in which he significantly avoided reference to the doctrine of the Trinity; and in the following year he attended the Anabaptist Council at Venice. In another work he maintained the comfortable doctrine that the great majority of men will be saved. And since he was friendly with Cellarius, Biandrata, Gribaldo, Ochino, Socinus, Stancaro, Chatillon, and other Antitrinitarians, and since he opposed the burning of Servetus and was regarded by Calvin as a Servetian, it is fair to presume him an Antitrinitarian at heart, even if not an outspoken one.
We have reached the end of our survey of the first scattered beginnings of Unitarianism in Europe. We have seen that during the first half-century after Luther, in all the countries in Western Europe where the Reformation took root (save England, of which we shall speak separately in later chapters), there were independent spirits who were not satisfied to stop where the leading reformers had stopped in their reform of the Church, but who wished to carry it further and thoroughly to reform the doctrines of Christianity, so that they might be based only on the teachings of the Bible and might not give offense to reason. These were the earliest Unitarians in Europe; or rather, they were the first to take those steps away from the orthodox doctrines of Christianity about God, Christ, the atonement, and related doctrines, which led at length to modern Unitarianism. Why did not their movement succeed better? The answer is plain to see. None of them was long permitted to proclaim his views unmolested. We have seen that in every instance thus far the penalty of denying the doctrine of the Trinity and of the Deity of Christ was bitter persecution — banishment, imprisonment, even death itself. One can hardly refrain from applying to these the words of the New Testament written of heroes of faith of an earlier time, “who through faith quenched the violence of fire, escaped the edge of the sword, were tortured, not accepting their deliverance; while others had trial of cruel mockings and scourgings, yea, moreover of bonds and imprisonment: they were slain with the sword: they wandered about in sheepskins and goatskins, being destitute, afflicted, tormented, of whom the world was not worthy.” None of these was permitted to live a peaceful life, and not a few suffered tragic deaths. The conscience and mind of man were not yet free in Protestant Europe, any more than in Catholic. The laws of the State were used to repress freedom of thought and free speech within the Church. Those that escaped death wandered over the face of Europe, happy if they might at last find somewhere a quiet corner to die in. Is it any wonder that Unitarianism did not spread faster? Indeed Unitarian views of Christianity would have come to an end almost in the generation in which they arose, had there not been in eastern Europe two remote countries where broader religious toleration prevailed, and where Unitarians might under the law in some measure enjoy equal rights with other Protestants. For the further development of our subject, promoted by some of those whom we have seen driven out of Italy and Switzerland, we have next, therefore, to turn to Poland and Transylvania.
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