It would appear that Œcolampadius, Bucer, Bullinger, Zwingli and others, their friends, had had a sort of ‘clerical meeting’ for talking over the theological questions of the day at Basle in the autumn of 1530. On this occasion Œcolampadius informed his friends that he had been troubled of late by a hot-headed Spaniard, Servetus by name, overflowing with Arian heresies and other objectionable opinions, maintaining particularly that Christ was not really and truly the Eternal Son of God; but if not, then was he not, and could not be, the Saviour—were Christus nit rächter, warer, ewiger Gott, so were er doch und könte nit seyn unser Heiland. Waxing warm in his tale, and fearing that such poison, as he conceived it, would not be poured into his ears alone, but would reach those of others, he was minded that measures should be taken against such a contingency. To this Zwingli, addressing him as brother Œcolampady, replied, that ‘there did seem good ground for them to be on their guard; for the false and wicked doctrine of the troublesome Spaniard goesfar to do away with the whole of our Christian religion.’ ‘God preserve us,’ said he, ‘from the coming in among us of any such wickedness. Do what you can, then, to quit the man of his errors, and with good and wholesome argument win him to the truth.’ ‘That have I already done,’ said Œcolampady; ‘but so haughty, daring and contentious is he, that all I say goes for nothing against him.’ ‘This is indeed a thing insufferable in the Church of God,’ said Zwingli—Ein unleydenliche Sach in der Kyrchen Gottes. Therefore do everything possible that such dreadful blasphemy get no further wind to the detriment of Christianity.’14
Besides the personal communication with Œcolampadius of which we have this interesting notice, Servetus must have written him several letters—unfortunately lost to us—about the same time, for we have two from the Reformer to the Spaniard, which have happily been preserved. In one of these (probably the second that was written), Servetus having, as it seems, complained that he had been somewhat sharply handled by his correspondent, Œcolampadius replies that he, for his part, thinks that he himself has the greater reason to complain. ‘You obtrude yourself on me,’ he says, ‘as if I had nothing else ado than to answer you; asking me questions about all the foolish things the Sorbonne has said of the Trinity, and even taking it amiss that I do not criticise and in your way oppose myself to thosedistinguished theologians, Athanasius and Nazianzenus. You contend that the Church has been displaced from its true foundation of faith in Christ, and feign that we speak of his filiation in a sense which detracts from the honour that is due to him as the Son of God. But it is you who speak blasphemously; for I now understand the diabolical subterfuges you use. Forbearing enough in other respects, I own that I am not possessed of that extreme amount of patience which would keep me silent when I see Christ dishonoured.’ He then goes on to criticise and rebut Servetus’s theological views—his denial of Two natures in the One person of Christ, and his opinion that in the prophetical writings of the Old Testament it is always a prospective or coming Son of God that is indicated. ‘You,’ continues Œcolampadius, ‘do not admit that it was the Son of God who was to come as man; but that it was the man who came that was the Son of God; language which leads to the conclusion that the Son of God existed not eternally before the incarnation.’
To satisfy the Reformer, or seeking to get upon a better footing with him, Servetus appears now to have composed and sent him a Confession of Faith, which has come down to us. On the face of this there was such a semblance of orthodoxy that Œcolampadius found nothing at first to object to in its statements; but having conversed with the writer and heard his explanations, he had come to see it as utterly fallacious, misleading, and inadmissible. He concludes by exhorting hiscorrespondent to ‘confess the Son to be consubstantial and coeternal with the Father, in which case,’ he says, ‘we shall be able to acknowledge you for a Christian.’15
The letter of Œcolampadius, as we have it, is without date, but must have been written from Basle at the close of 1530, or the beginning of 1531, and so before the book on Trinitarian Error had been published, as we find no mention made of the work. By this time, however, Servetus must have had the treatise ready for press, for it was now that he put it into the hands of Conrad Kœnig or Rous, a publisher, having establishments both at Basle and Strasburg. Kœnig was not a printer himself; but accepting the work for publication he sent it to Jo. Secerius, of Hagenau, in Alsace, a well-known typographer of the day, to be put into type. To Hagenau accordingly went the MS., followed by the author to superintend the printing; intending from thence to proceed to Strasburg, where he was anxious to have interviews with the leading Reformers of that city, Martin Bucer and W. F. Capito, and propound to them, as he had done to the Switzers, the new views of Christian doctrine at which he had arrived.
From what we know already we might conclude that he found little more encouragement from the ministers of Strasburg than he had had from those of Basle. Servetus himself, however, appears to have thought otherwise, and left them with the impression that neither of the Strasburgers was so wholly opposed to his views as Œcolampadius in particular had shown himself at Basle. We find him, by and by, in fact, speaking as if he even believed that in the first instance they were alike disposed to abet rather than condemn his conclusions. And this, from what came out subsequently, seems really to have been the case, in so far, at least, as Capito stands concerned. Capito was, in fact, the most advanced and truly tolerant of all the early Reformers, and if we may rely on the report we have of his opinions from the author of the ‘Antitrinitarian Library,’16he was really not behind Servetus in his rejection of the orthodox tripartite Deity. A kindly sympathy with a young enthusiast, full of fancies on topics really beyond the reach of demonstration, may have induced Bucer as well as his colleague, Capito, to feel a certain interest in the subject of our study, and so led them both to treat him otherwise than as the irreverent dreamer he had appeared to Œcolampadius; to see him, in a word, as he was in truth—a well-read and piously disposed, albeit in their opinion a more or less mistaken, scholar.
Servetus undoubtedly possessed the character of the enthusiast in perfection, and by natural constitutionwas not only indisposed, but to a certain extent incapable of seeing a question in any light save that in which he set it himself. Bucer, although he became hostile to Servetus in the end, must in fact have been not a little taken with him on their earlier intercourse, when in a letter to a friend he speaks of him as ‘his dear son’—‘filius meus dilectus.’ When not curtly met as the rash innovator and heretic, Servetus was neither the proud nor the impracticable man he appeared to Œcolampadius and Calvin. During his visit to Strasburg, when he was doubtless busy with his ‘De Trinitatis Erroribus’—revising, polishing, and seeing it through the press—in a notable modification of the terms in which one of the cardinal points of his doctrine is spoken of in an earlier and in a later passage of the work, Bucer’s kindly counsel, it is presumed, may be detected. Whilst in Book IV. we find these words, ‘The Word is never spoken of in Scripture as the Son; the Word was the shadow only, Christ was the substance,’ in Book VII. he says, ‘The Word is never spoken of in Scripture as the Son; but to Christ himself there is ascribed a kind of eternity of engenderment. The things that were under theLawwere shadows of the body of Christ.’17
Whatever the two distinguished Reformers of Strasburg may have said, however—and we can hardly doubt of their having tried to win him to the views that were commonly entertained—he was not stayed for amoment in his purpose of getting into print. Nay—and we know not why the right should be refused him—he seems to have thought himself at as full liberty as the leaders of the great movement then afoot to give his own interpretation of the kind of reform which not the Church only, but its doctrine, required. For such an undertaking he was as well qualified by culture as any of the Reformers—better qualified, in fact, than many among them, as in genius we believe he was surpassed, and in liberality and tolerance approached by none. Servetus, in truth, had started in the reforming race unweighted, and so, and in so far with a better chance of reaching the goal of simple truth than either Luther or Calvin; for though he had received the education of the cloister, he was neither professed monk nor priest; and, without detriment to the piety of his spirit, or his belief in what were held by the world as the oracles of God, he had freed himself from the fetters of necessary assent to the interpretations put upon these, formulated into dogmas, by the Church in which he had been born and bred. Servetus seems never to have had any misgivings about his title to show himself among the number of the Reformers. He was in Germany, the land of free thought, as he imagined; among men who had thought freely, and whom he had been used to hear spoken of by his clerical surroundings, whilst in the suite of Quintana, as heretics and blasphemers. These names he did not fear in such respectable company as he found the Reformersof Switzerland and Germany to be; and though he did not agree with them on some topics, he could bear with them as well in that wherein he differed from them as in that wherein they differed among themselves, and saw no reason why they should not in like manner bear with him. He thought of nothing, therefore, but prospective fame for himself in the publication he contemplated. The names of Luther, Melanchthon, Calvin, and the rest, appeared on the title-pages of their works: why, then, should his name be withheld from the world? On the title-page of the ‘Seven Books on Mistaken Conceptions of the Trinity’ accordingly, which now came forth from the press, we find not only his family name, Servetus, but the alias, Revés, from his mother’s side of the house, and the name of the country that called him son:—
‘De Trinitatis Erroribus, Libri Septem.Per Michaelem Serveto, alias Revés,Ab Aragonia, Hispanum,1531.’
‘De Trinitatis Erroribus, Libri Septem.Per Michaelem Serveto, alias Revés,Ab Aragonia, Hispanum,1531.’
‘De Trinitatis Erroribus, Libri Septem.Per Michaelem Serveto, alias Revés,Ab Aragonia, Hispanum,1531.’
The publisher and printer, having an eye to business, not notoriety, and suspicious in all probability of the reception the article in the production of which they were aiding and abetting, might receive, were more cautious than the author; for the name neither of printer, publisher, nor place of publication, appears on the title-page. In the month of July, 1531, however, the book was to be bought at once in thecities of Strasburg, Frankfort, and Basle: but no one knew for more than twenty years where it had been printed, nor who besides the author—who had also vanished out of sight—had been accessory to its publication. The truth only came out in the course of the author’s trial at Geneva in the year 1553. Basle had the credit for a time of having hatched the cockatrice; and that the charge was taken seriously to heart appears from a letter of Œcolampadius to Bucer which has been preserved.
The Swiss churches, as is known, were not all at one with Luther and his followers upon some of the transcendental topics of their common faith; and Servetus in his book having attacked the Doctrine of Justification by Faith—the leading feature in Luther’s theology, in terms neither complimentary nor respectful, the Switzers were anxious to have the great head of the Reform movement informed that they had nothing in common with the Serveto, alias Revés, of the book ‘De Trinitatis Erroribus,’ and that it had not fallen from any of the presses of their country. In his letter to Bucer dated from Basle, August 5, 1531, Œcolampadius informs him that ‘several of their friends had seen Servetus’s book and were beyond measure offended with it.’ ‘I wish you would write to Luther,’ he continues, ‘and tell him it was printed elsewhere than at Basle, and without any privity of ours. It is surely a piece of consummate impudence in the writer to say that the Lutherans are ignorantof what Justification really means. Passing many things by, I fancy he must belong to the sect of the Photinians, or to some other I know not what. Unless he be put down by the doctors of our church, it will be the worse for us. I pray you of all others to keep watch; and if you find no better or earlier opportunity, be particular in your report to the Emperor in excusing us and our churches from the breaking in among us of this wild beast. He indeed abuses everything in his way of viewing it; and to such lengths does he go that he disputes the coeternity and consubstantiality of the Father and the Son—he would even have the man Christ to be the Son of God in the usual natural way.’18
Bucer having perused the ‘De Trinitatis Erroribus’ would seem to have been excessively disturbed or scandalised by its contents. Known as a man of a perfectly humane disposition in a general way, he is now violent even to slaying. Denouncing its author from the pulpit, he is said to have declared that the writer of such a book deserved to be disembowelled and torn in pieces! Yet was not Martin Bützer always of this savage way of thinking. In a Preface and Postscript to an early work—a translation by a friend, of Augustin’s Treatise ‘on the Duty of the Ruler in matters of Religion,’19he is as mercifully disposedtowards the erring as could be desired. They are to be prayed for, instructed, and it may be punished, but it is to be mildly; they are never to be put to death. He refers to his ‘Dialogues’ in which the subject is treated at length.
Luther, too, must have read the work, and it is not a little interesting to us to be made aware from what he says himself that he, like others of the Reformers, as well as Michael Servetus, had been troubled with doubts about the conformity of the orthodox Trinitarian dogma with the dictates of simple reason. In the Table-Talk—Tisch-Reden—of 1532, he refers to what he characterises as ‘a fearfully wicked book—ein greulich bös Buch—’ which had lately come out against the doctrine of the holy Trinity. ‘Visionaries like the writer,’ says Doctor Martin, ‘do not seem to fancy that other folks as well as they may have had temptations on this subject. But the sting did not hold; I set the word of God and the Holy Ghost against my thoughts and got free.’ Luther as usual imagined that the doubts he felt were inspired by the Devil, instead of by God, through the reason given him for his guidance.20
But of all his contemporaries Melanchthon appears to have been more taken with the work on Trinitarian Error than any other of the leading Reformers; and he is much more outspoken in expressing his opinion of the incomprehensible and really unscriptural natureof the dogma which it is the gist of Servetus’s book to impugn. To one of his friends he begins his letter by telling him ‘that he has been reading Servetus a great deal—Servetum multum lego—though I am well aware of the fanatical nature of the man. In his derisive treatment of Justification he sees nothing but thequalityof Augustin; and he plainly raves when, misinterpreting the text of the Old and New Testament, he denies to the Prophets the Holy Spirit. I also think he does injustice both to Tertullian and Irenæus, when, treating of the Word, he makes them question its being an hypostasis. But I have little doubt that great controversies will one day arise on this subject, as well as on the distinction of the two natures in Christ.’21
To Camerarius, another friend, he writes: ‘You ask me what I think of Servetus? I see him indeed sufficiently sharp and subtle in disputation, but I do not give him credit for much depth. He is possessed, as it seems to me, of confused imaginations, and his thoughts are not well matured on the subjects he discusses. He manifestly talks foolishness when he speaks of Justification. Περὶ τῆς τρίαδος—on the subject of the Trinity—you know, I have always feared that serious difficulties would one day arise. Good God! to what tragedies will not these questions give occasion in times to come: εἴ ἐστιν ὑπόστασις ὁ λὀγος—is the Logos an hypostasis? εἴ ἐστιν ὑπόστασις τὸ πνεῦμα—isthe Holy Ghost an hypostasis? For my own part I refer me to those passages of Scripture that bid us call on Christ, which is to ascribe divine honours to him, and find them full of consolation.’22
This is surely very candid and beautiful. But the spirit of the Prophet of Nazareth did not always find such a resting place as it did in the heart and mind of Philip Schwarzerde, though he too could forget himself and approve of violence, as we shall see, when certain beliefs which he held sacred and thought it a public duty to profess were assailed. At this time, however, on this occasion, he is in his proper placable frame of mind and continues thus: ‘I find it after all of little use to inquire too curiously into that which properly constitutes the nature of aPerson, and into that wherein and whereby persons are distinguished from one another. It is very provoking that in Epiphanius, except a few trifling passages, we have nothing from the days when the same questions were agitated by Paul of Samosata—nothing in fact whence we might know what was thought of Paul’s opinions at the time, and of what mind were they who condemned him. I am even greatly distressed when I think of such negligence on the part of the hierarchs of the age of this Paul, as well as of times more near our own.’ When writing thus Melanchthon plainly sympathised more with Paul of Samosata and his opinions than hewould have liked to acknowledge at a later period of his life; for he, too, like so many who become narrow and intolerant in age, was liberal enough when younger, and in the earlier editions of his ‘Loci Theologici’ could speak of the Holy Spirit as nothing more than an ‘Afflatus of Deity.’
The above extracts from confidential letters seem to show that Melanchthon was not himself quite clear as to the sense in which a Trinity of the Godhead was to be understood; a state of mind shared in, unless we much mistake, by more than one among the most influential men of the Swiss Churches, by none more certainly than by Calvin, their great head, himself, as we shall show. Melanchthon indeed in his next letter to the same friend, speaking of Servetus’s assumption that Tertullian did not think the Logos an hypostasis—a distinct substantial reality—proceeds:—‘To me Tertullian seems to think on this subject as we do in public—quod publice sentimus, and not in the way Servetus interprets him. But of these things more hereafter when we meet.’ Melanchthon would not therefore trust in writing, even to an intimate friend, all he thought on the subject of the Trinity; and truly there is matter enough when critically scanned in the first edition of his best-known work—‘The Loci Theologici’ of 1521—that puts him out of the pale of orthodox Trinitarianism.23
Neither was Joannes Œcolampadius without something of a fellow feeling for Servetus, although he repudiated his conclusions. Writing to Martin Bucer on July 18, 1531, shortly after the publication of the work on Trinitarian misconception, he informs his friend that he had heard from Capito of Strasburg, who tells him that the book is for sale among them there, and has rejoiced some of the enemies of the Church, as it will also afford matter of gratulation to the Papists of France when they see that writings of the kind are suffered to be published in Germany. ‘Read the book,’ continues the writer, ‘and tell me what you think of it. Were I not busy with my Job, I should be disposed to answer it myself; but I must leave this duty to another with more leisure at command. Our Senate have forbidden the Spaniard’s book to be sold here. They have asked my opinion of its merits, and I have said that as the writer does not acknowledge the coeternity of the Son, I can in no wise approve of it as a whole, although it contains much else that is good—Etiamsi multa alia bona scribat.’24
In the days of Philip Melanchthon and Joannes Œcolampadius we therefore see that men hadprivateopinions on subjects to which they were committed by their subscriptions, which differed we know not how widely from their public professions, precisely as among the ancients, and ourselves at the present time:culture would still seem to make an esoteric and an exoteric doctrine a necessity of existence.
Made aware, as we are by these letters of the Reformers, that Servetus’s book was causing a considerable stir both in Switzerland and Germany, it seems, in so far as we have ascertained, to have been entirely neglected by the Roman Catholics of these lands as well as of France. We have searched in vain for any notice of it in French theological writings of the period; neither have we been able to discover, though condemned and ordered to be suppressed by the Emperor Charles V. when brought under his notice by Cochlæus and Quintana at Ratisbon, that it figures at any early date on the Roman Index of prohibited books. There are good reasons for believing, nevertheless, that Servetus’s book on Trinitarian Misconception had a large amount of influence on Italian ground. It had been sent south in numbers; and aware of this Melanchthon took it upon him by-and-by to address the Senate of Venice on the subject, informing them that a highly objectionable work was for sale among them, and suggesting that measures should be taken for its suppression. The Sozzini, uncle and nephew—Lælius and Faustus Socinus—and their followers, the Unitarians, have consequently been seen as the disciples of Servetus, though it may be that they were so only indirectly; for Servetus himself, as we shall find, declares that he does not deny a kind of trinity in theunity of God. But his trinity ismodalorformal, notrealorpersonalin the usual sense of the word.
If overlooked by theologians of the Latin races, the work of our author appears to have attracted all the more attention from the men of Teutonic descent who had espoused the cause of the Reformation. In their ranks in the early period of the sixteenth century the intelligence of Europe, in so far as the religious question was concerned, seems to have been concentrated. They took pains to inform themselves generally on all that was going on in the republic of letters, and in so much of it very particularly as bore on the subject they had most at heart. It is among the Swiss and German Reformers consequently that we find any particular notice taken of Servetus’s book on Trinitarian Error. They alone show themselves scandalised by the opinions of its author and his style of expressing them, jealous too, it might seem, at the intrusion of a mere layman into their domain—a phenomenon as yet perfectly unheard of, and startled further by the advances they discovered in the book upon all that they, as inheritors of apostolic traditions in common with their Roman Catholic brethren (from whom in matters of Dogma they differed so little), regarded as the truth. Paul of Tarsus preaching his own independent gospel to the Gentiles, proclaiming the universality of the fatherhood of God, the nothingness of Circumcision, and, in opposition to the whole Levitical code, that all days were alike holy and that it was not what wentinto the mouth of a man that defiled him, could scarcely have been more ominous to the intolerant Nazarene Church of Jerusalem than was the appearance of this daring innovator upon the religious stage of Germany. His book, everywhere freely sold in the first instance, must have been read by everyone of liberal education, though it became so scarce ere long, denounced and decried as it must have been universally by the ministers, that twenty years afterwards a copy, most pressingly wanted, and eagerly sought after, was nowhere to be found in Switzerland; so effectually had zealotry succeeded in having it committed to the flames!
Strasburg and Basle, however, must have been the emporiums whence the supplies of the ‘De Erroribus Trinitatis’ were sent forth; for after its author’s visit to the capital of Elsass and his happy delivery of this the first-born of his genius at Hagenau, we find him again in Basle and making himself obnoxious to Œcolampadius as before. Writing what we must presume to be a second or third letter to the Reformer, and complimenting him on what he is pleased to style his correspondent’s clear apprehension of Luther’s doctrine of Justification, Servetus goes on to make a personal request. ‘Somewhat fearful of writing to you again,’ he says, ‘lest I should molest you still more than I have already done, I yet venture to ask of you not to interfere with my sending the books to France which I have with me here, the book-fair of Lyons drawingnear; for you of all men are better entitled than any one else to pronounce an opinion upon things unheard of until now. If you think it better that I should not remain here, I shall certainly take my leave; only, you are not to think that I go as a fugitive. God knows I have been sincere in all I have written, although my crude style perchance displeases you. I did not imagine you would take offence at what I say of the Lutherans; especially when from your own mouth I heard you declare you were of opinion that Luther had treated Charity in too off-hand a style; adding, as you did, that folks were charitable mostly when they had nothing else to think of. Melanchthon, too, as you know, affirms that God has no regard for charity. Such sayings, believe me, are more hurtful to the soul than anything I have ever written. And this all the more as I see that you are not agreed among yourselves on the subject of faith; for with my own ears I have heard you say one thing, which is otherwise declared by doctor Paulus, otherwise by Luther, and yet otherwise by Melanchthon;25and of this I admonished you in your own house; but you would not hear me.
‘Your rule for proving the Spirit, I think, deceives you; for, if in your own mind there be any fear, ordoubt, or confusion, you cannot judge truly of me; and this the more because, although you know me in error in one thing, you ought not, therefore, to condemn me in others, else there were none who should escape burning a thousand times over. This truth is forced on us on all hands, most especially perhaps by the example of the Apostles, who sometimes erred. And, then, you do not condemn Luther in every particular, although you are well aware that he is mistaken in some things. I have myself entreated you to instruct me, which, however, you have not done. It is surely an infirmity of our human nature that none of us see our own faults, and so commonly look on those who differ from us as impious persons or impostors. I entreat you, for God’s sake, to spare my name and reputation. I say nothing of others who are not interested in the questions between us. You say that I would have no one punished or put to death, though all were thieves alike; but I call the omnipotent God to witness that this is not my opinion; nay, I scout any such conclusion. If I have spoken at any time on the subject (the punishment proper for heresy), it was because I saw it as a most serious matter to put men to death on the ground of mistake in interpreting the Scriptures; for do we not read that even the elect may err? You know full well that I have not treated my subject in so indifferent or indiscreet a manner as to deserve entire rejection at your hands. You makelittle yourself of speaking of the Holy Spirit as an angel, but think it a great crime in me when I say that the Son of God was a man.
‘Farewell.‘Michael Serveto.’26
This letter, so characteristic of the writer, is full of interest even at the present hour. Servetus would have Œcolampadius instruct him; but the invariable complaint of all with whom he came in contact was that he could never be made to receive instruction; in other words, secure in his own conclusions, he thought his would-be instructors mistaken in theirs. And this, indeed, for good or ill, is characteristic of all who impress their age, and show themselves leaders in art, in science, in policy, or religion. Genius measures with its own rod, and is its own guide on the way it goes. The world is not moved by men who have all they own from teachers.
But especially worthy of note is the remark our writer makes on the serious responsibility men assume when they put each other to death for mistaken interpretations of Scripture. Had no scholar in modern times before Servetus come to so great and charitable a conclusion, we should still have to hallow the memory of the man who, more than three hundred years ago, had the head and the heart to proclaimso great a principle, in the enforcement of which in all its aspects the better spirits of the world still find such opposition; though it is not now by the infliction of death that bigotry and intolerance revenge themselves on their victims, the advocates of freethought and outspoken religious criticism.
A good deal has been said, by its author as well as others, of the crude style of the book on Trinitarian Error. But this to us seems the least of its faults—the language is generally simple enough, not Ciceronian certainly, but the meaning, save where the writer probably did not quite understand himself, is not doubtful. As a composition, it is the arrangement that is most defective. The parts have so little either of coherence or sequence, that of the seven books or chapters into which it is divided, the last, as it seems, might advantageously have been made the first. For there it is, and not until the penultimate page of the entire treatise is attained, that the key to the writer’s most important conclusions is discovered. ‘Two fundamental rules or principles,’ he says, ‘are to be steadily kept in view:—1st, That the nature of God cannot be conceived as divisible; and 2nd, That that which is accidental to the nature of anything is disposition.’ The corollary he would have to follow from these premisses or postulates being, that the orthodox idea of a Trinity,i.e., of the existence of three distinct persons or entities in the unity of the Godhead, is an impossibility, and so a fundamental religious error. AsServetus himself believed in God, and acknowledged a Son of God and a Holy Spirit—finding mention of these in the Scriptures, no word of which would he overlook, though putting his own interpretation on all they say—he held that the Son and Holy Ghost, in consonance with his Second Principle, must be what he callsdispositions, ordispensationsof the one eternal indivisible Deity—in other words, manifestations of God in the world.
The ‘Idea of God’ to which Servetus had attained is unquestionably grand. ‘God,’ he says, ‘is eternal, one and indivisible, and in himself inscrutable, but making his being known in and through creation; so that not only is every living, but every lifeless thing, an aspect of the Deity. Before creation was, God was; but neither was he Light, nor Word, nor Spirit, but some ineffable thing else—sed quid aliud ineffabile—these, Light, Word, Spirit, being mere dispensations, modes or expressions of pre-existing Deity. (‘Dial.’ i. 4.) God, he says, has no proper nature; for this would imply a beginning; andbeforeandafterare terms that have no significance when they are referred to God. Though God knew what to man would be a future, his own prescience was without respect totime, and involved no such necessity as is implied inchoice. God, he continues, can be defined by nothing that pertains to body; he created the world of himself, of his substance, and, as essence, he actuates—essentiat—all things. (‘Dial.’ ii.) The Spirit of God is theuniversal agent; it is in the air we breathe, and is the very breath of life; it moves the heavenly bodies; sends out the winds from their quarters; takes up and stores the water in the clouds, and pours it out as rain to fertilise the earth. God is therefore ever distinct from the universe of things, and when we speak of the Word, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, we but speak of the presence and power of God projected into creation, animating and actuating all that therein is, man more especially than aught else; ‘the Holy Spirit I always say is the motion of God in the soul of man, and that out of man there cannot properly be said to be any Holy Spirit.’ (‘De Trin. Err.’ f. 85, b, and ‘Dial.’ ii.) This is obviously a statement of what may be called the Exo-pantheistic principle in very broad terms, akin to what we find in the Grecian mythology and certain schools of philosophy; other than the Endo-pantheistic conception of later times—the Causa Principio et Uno of Giordano Bruno,27the Substantia of Spinoza, the Universum or Kosmos of Goethe,28Hegel, Humboldt, Schopenhauer, D. F. Strauss,29&c. It is the Principle inseparable from the mighty All as from the individual Atom, or Pantheism proper.
We shall, by-and-by, find our author, on his Geneva trial, damaging his case and exciting, we may imagine, the astonishment of the unlettered among his judges, by the assertion of his pantheistic notions, and arousing the needless, and it may even be, the assumed ire of Calvin—for he was familiar with the idea, having said himself that he only objected to call Nature, God, because it was a hard and improper expression—quia est dura et impropria loquutio.30
Criticising the first verse of the Fourth Gospel: ‘Inthe beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God,’ Servetus maintains that the Greek λὀγος, translated Word with us, does not designate an entity but utterance or speech, as appears by its etymology, derived as it is from λἐγω, to speak, to discourse. Of the Word of God, therefore, to make the Son of God is to do as did the heathen, who turned ideas or abstractions into mythical beings—Echo into a Nymph, Fortitude into Minerva, &c., and so to bring discord and dissidence upon the truths of Scripture. (‘De Tr. Err.’ f. 47, b.) The Word spoken by God in the beginning implies fore-thought, fore-knowledge; whence it is characterised as Wisdom, ‘that was from the beginning or ever the earth was. Under the mystery of the Word, the older apostolic tradition understood a certain dispensation whereby God willed to reveal himself to mankind. The Word of God therefore is equivalent to the Act of God; and even as Light came of the spoken word, so too came Creation, so too came Man.’ In this way, says our author, do we readily comprehend the expression of John: ‘The Word was made flesh,’ and learn in what sense Christ is truly the Word: ‘He is, as it were, the voice of God enunciating to mankind the will of the Universal Father.’ (Ib. f. 49 b.) The Word, consequently, is nothing different from God, but is God himself evoking all things, Christ among the number in the fulness of time. If a reasonable meaning is to be attached to mystical language, it seems difficult toimagine any more satisfactory interpretation than this of Servetus, with which we see that of a distinguished liberal divine of our own day essentially to agree, as he says: ‘The Logos of the New Testament means not only the Word as translated, but Reason, Intelligence, communicating itself in thought and speech. It is the divine wisdom which was from the beginning in the mind of God made manifest in time.’31
The titleSon of God, again, Servetus maintains is nowhere to be found in the Scriptures otherwise applied than to a man—to the man Jesus in particular; and the wordPersonhe insists is always to be understood in the sense of the Greek προσῶπον and the Latinpersona, a mask, an appearance, and not anyrealor individual thing. With this style of exposition the Reformers could of course by no means agree. They had adopted all the symbols of their predecessors of the Church of Rome; and it seems to have been Servetus’ insistance on his own divergent interpretation of the language of John and the creeds that more especially aroused the enmity of Œcolampadius, Bucer, Calvin, and the rest, they holding that to be accounted a Christian it was necessary not only to acknowledge Christ to be the Son of God, which Servetus was quite ready to do, in the way he understood the filiation, but to acknowledge him to be the Logos or Word of St. John, consubstantial and coeternalwith the Father—which, to Servetus, was impossible. It is probable that the way and manner in which in any conceivable fashion such coeternity and consubstantiality could be apprehended was among the topics on which Servetus craved enlightenment from Œcolampadius; and as he could obtain none, pique and personal dislike, opposition and enmity, took the place of dispassionate and friendly discussion; precisely as happened in later years and mainly on the same subjects between our author and Calvin.
In his attempt to develope and explain his own conception of the mystery of the Trinity—for it is a mistake to suppose that Servetus was opposed to something of the kind—he does not set out like the writer of the Fourth Gospel from the transcendental Word, but starts with the historical Jesus, the man, the reputed son of Joseph the Carpenter, but verily or naturally, as he says, the Son of God. To this son the name Jesus was given at the time of his circumcision, the title Christ being conferred by his disciples; whilst it was only at his baptism that he was designated Son of God. The Holy Spirit and power of the Highest overshadowing the Virgin Mary, and acting in her as generator or generative dew, Jesus the Son of God and her Son was engendered. It is not the Word consequently, but Jesus the Son of Mary who is a Son of God: ‘The holy thing that shall be born of thee,’ says the angel addressing the Virgin, ‘shall be called a Son of God.’ ‘They thereforeplainly err,’ says Servetus, ‘who speak of the Word as the Son of God: the man Jesus was the Son of God, not the Word; the man Jesus engendered, as stated above, by God in the womb of the Virgin.’ ‘All the Trinitarian errors,’ he concludes, ‘have arisen from not understanding the true nature of the Incarnation.’
When he comes to speak of the Holy Ghost, Servetus unhappily forgets what is due to the discussion of a subject that has engaged the serious thoughts of so many pious men. He would seem to have seen some portions of the catholic Christian dogma as so unreasonable that they were even open to ridicule; and this leads him to the use of improper language. The Holy Ghost, he maintains, is never spoken of save confusedly in the Scriptures, the term being applied variously now to an angel, now to the soul of man, and again to nothing more than wind or breath (Ib. f. 22, a.). The Hebrew wordRuach, of which spirit or wind is a translation, has indeed a still greater variety of meanings. On a subject so indefinite and undefined as the Holy Spirit, we cannot wonder that Œcolampadius in one of his letters should declare he can make nothing of what Servetus says on the matter—‘dicit nescio quid—he says I know not what.’ This much, however, we do make out as our author’s opinion, viz.: that the Holy Spirit is nowhere spoken of in Scripture as a distinct and independent entity, but always as a motion, an agency, an afflatus of God or the power of God,—a view in which hecertainly had Melanchthon as his predecessor: ‘Nec aliud spiritus sanctus est nisi viva Dei voluntas et agitatio.’ (‘Loci Theol.’ p. 128, ed. 1521.)
Referring to the dogma of the ‘Two Natures,’ Servetus holds that this, too, is founded in error. ‘To speak of theNatureof God,’ he says, ‘is absurd; for the word nature can only apply to something created, something born (from the Latinnatus). But God is from Eternity. For my own part,’ he proceeds, ‘I never take nature to signify aught but the thing to which the term is applied—the nature of a thing is the thing itself. To use the word nature in connection with the name of God is, therefore, to speak of God himself. And so of the Son of God: that which was an idea, image, or type of the Son in the mind of God, when the Word was made flesh, became or was Christ, Reality then superseding Idea (‘De Tr. Er.’ f. 92). There was consequently no aggregate of two natures or two different things in Christ; he was one entity or person, in the usual sense of the word.’ Servetus very inconsistently, as it seems at first sight, often speaks of the man Jesus as God. But he can do so only on the same ground as Cyrus in the Bible, Augustus Cæesar, and other rulers, are calledDiiorDivi—gods. The Son of God, to Servetus, in conformity with the pantheistic idea, can only be an aspect orModeof the One God. If this be not his meaning, I know not what it is.
We have said above that Servetus is not opposed to the idea of a Trinity of dispositions, powers, or propertiesin the Deity, but only denies such a trinity of persons or entities as is embodied in the symbols of orthodox Christianity. It is not unimportant, therefore, to learn what the precise idea was which he had of the threefold state he acknowledged as extant in the essence of God. His words are these: ‘Tres sunt admirandi Dei dispositiones in quarum qualibet divinitas relucet, ex quo sanissime Trinitatem intelligere posses, &c.—There are three admirable dispositions in God, in each of which divinity appears, and from which you may satisfactorily understand the Trinity. For the Father is the one God, from whom proceed certain dispensations. But these imply no distinction into separate entities. By the economy of God—Deiοἰκονομίαν—they are no more than so many forms or aspects of Deity; for the divineness that is in the Father, the same is in the Son, and in the Holy Ghost.’
In another passage, he asserts his belief in a Trinity still more distinctly: ‘I concede one person of the Father, another person of the Son, another person of the Holy Ghost: three persons in one God, and this is the true Trinity.’ (Ib. f. 64, b.) Had we not our author’s explanation of the way in which he understands the wordperson, this would make his conception, in so far, not different from the orthodox interpretation of the mystery. But his language here must be regretted, for it is misleading, the wordpersonwith Servetus not signifying, as we have seen, any real orindividual entity distinct from other entities, but property, appearance, or outward manifestation. The second and third persons, therefore, as understood by Servetus, are to be thought of as dispositions or modes of God, the universal Father, and not as individuals or persons in the usual acceptation of these words, though of them it is that distinct personages have been made, and spoken of as being at once God and other than God, as being three and yet no more than one.
In sequence to this, our author goes on to say that ‘he will not make use of the word Trinity, which is not to be found in Scripture, and only seems to perpetuate philosophical error. It were well, indeed,’ he continues, ‘that all distinction of persons in the one God were henceforth abandoned and rooted out of the minds of men’ (Ib. f. 64, b.); words in which we see reason getting the better of subserviency to the letter of Scripture, and putting an extinguisher, as it were, upon his own as well as other vain attempts to give a rational explanation of the mystical Neo-Platonic Logos-Doctrine of the Fourth Gospel, of which the Trinitarian Church-Dogma is the outcome. Hampered, however, by the idea that everything in the Bible is the word of God, Servetus insists on trying to find, for himself and his readers, something like an acceptable interpretation of the leading words of the Imaginative Mystical Discourse entitled the Gospel according to John. In this he fails, as might have been anticipated; and then, his eyes being opened to the fact, he has nothing for it butto conclude that the orthodox Trinitarian mystery were well discarded from the thoughts and the beliefs of man. ‘To believe, however,’ he continues, ‘suffices, it is said; but what folly to believe aught that cannot be understood, that is impossible in the nature of things, and that may even be looked on as blasphemous! Can it be that mere confusion of mind is to be assumed as an adequate object of faith?’ (Ib. f. 33, b.)
The Trinitarian doctrine of dogmatic Christianity Servetus held to have been a great obstacle to the spread of the religion of Christ. Opposed to the conception of the Oneness of Deity to which the Jews had finally attained, the religious system in which it was made so prominent an element, could not possibly be accepted by them; neither, on the same ground, could it be received by Islam; for Mahomet, whilst he acknowledged Jesus as a prophet and power in the world, born of a Virgin, too, like other distinguished individuals, in some incomprehensible manner, never for a moment thought of him as the Son of God; for ‘God,’ says he, ‘as he is not engendered, so neither does he engender.’
But it is not in connexion with the subject of the Trinity alone that Servetus shows the advances he had made on his age in the sphere of Biblical exposition. Commenting on the text, ‘No man hath ascended up to heaven but he who came down from heaven’ (John iii. 13), he says: ‘It is the spiritual heaven that is here to be understood, and this exists wherever Christ is;“to ascend to heaven” means no more than to discourse of heavenly things. “He that hath seen me hath seen the Father,” says the text (Ib. xiv. 9), i.e., says our expositor, ‘he who appreciates the priceless treasures of Christ’s love easily attains to a knowledge of God the Father. But how should an invisible, intangible Word give us to know God?’ (‘De Tr. Err.’ f. 46et seq.)
There are others among the accepted doctrines of the reformed Churches which, as repudiated by Servetus and so arraying the whole of their adherents against him and influencing his fate, require a passing notice at our hands. Justification by Faith, for instance, he maintains, comes not by belief in the merits or sufferings of Christ, but by belief in his worth or dignity as Son of God. On this ground, he says, the Lutherans do not understand what Justification really is. It is by belief of the kind he specifies, however, that we show our obedience to God, accept the new covenant instead of the old law, become the children of our heavenly Father, and have the Holy Spirit imparted to us. Such belief is, in fact, the very kernel of the Christian dispensation, and that on which the new covenant of grace reposes. It is the real rock on which Peter was to build the Church, against which the gates of hell should not prevail. But as hell does seem to have got the upper hand, he adds, we can only conclude that neither the Church on the rock nor the true Faith is now to be found among us. The Lutheran Justification byFaith, in a word, is mere magical fascination and folly (f. 82-84, Conf. ‘Ep. ad Calvin.’ xiii.).
But Faith, even the most fervent, is not yet sufficient for salvation. The Justification thereby attained is still no more than negative in kind; to become positive, it must be associated with Love, i.e., with Charity in the widest sense of the word; with the Love, that is the fulfilment of the law, whereby alone do we secure for ourselves treasures in heaven. Faith is the entrance, Charity the sanctuary—Fides ostium, Charitas perfectio; and there is a fine passage in the ‘Christianismi Restitutio’ (p. 349), comparable in some sort to Paul’s eloquent outburst on the excellence of that much misused sentiment. When Servetus speaks of Charity, therefore, it is not the eleemosynary idea of his day that is meant, with its mendicant friars, its convent doles, and its engendered sloth and beggary; neither is it the mistaken view of later days, which gives indolence and improvidence a legal claim on industry and thrift. It is of the nobler, truer kind that, beside good works, gives man a right to think and to speak unfettered, and forbids him to fancy that his brother is damned for divergency in theological opinion.
To the leading Calvinistic doctrines of Predestination and Election, involving as they do fettered instead of free will, Servetus is still more violently opposed than to the Lutheran Justification by Faith. ‘In your fatal, not to say fatuous, necessity of all things, or your servile will,’ says he, at a later period in his life, ‘there isa certain show of folly, seeing that you would have a man do that which you must know he cannot do. You speak of free acts, yet tell us there is no such thing as free action. And it is absurd in you to derive the servile will you abet from this: that it is God who acts in us. Truly God does act in us, and in such wise that we act freely. He acts in us so that we understand and will and pursue. Even as all things consist essentially in God, so do all acts proceed essentially from him. But the power in us to do is one thing, the necessity of doing is another; and though God may deal with us as the potter deals with his clay, it does not follow that we are nothing more than clay, and have no power of action in ourselves.’ (Ib f. 79, b, et ‘Epist. ad Calvinum,’ xxii.)
Another of the most essential doctrines underlying Pauline Christianity, original sin, is made little of by Servetus. Although I spent much time in reading his books, I do not appear to have made a note of more than one or two passages in which he refers to that subject; and when he does, it is by the way rather than more particularly. It is on the necessity of faith in Christ, as he understands the Sonship, that he dwells continually, making of this the prime factor in his scheme of restored Christianity. ‘This faith it is,’ says he, ‘that first makes us aware of our poverty, of our misery; for if we believe that Christ is the Son of God and the Saviour of the world, we already assume that the world is sinful, and requires saving’ (‘Chr.Rest.’ p. 349). He does not refer particularly to what is called ‘the Fall,’ neither does he say very pointedly how the world came into the sorry plight in which he admits that he finds it. The reason usually assigned must have appeared unsatisfactory to an understanding so clear as that of Servetus, when unclouded by fancies of his own creating; but we can hardly think he mends matters by ascribing the origin of sin to heaven and the rebellion of the angels, as he does, instead of to the earth and Adam’s disobedience. Far from maintaining that the heart of man is corrupt and evil by nature, he holds that the cause of good works and well-doing is proper and spontaneous to the individual, who is only answerable for his own sin, not for the sin of another. Faith in Christ, therefore, as the naturally-begotten Son of God; Charity, in which are comprised all the virtues, and a good life, in so far as we can make it out, form the backbone of Servetus’s Christianity, as it is unfolded in his earliest work on ‘Current Misconceptions of the Trinity.’32
THE AUTHORITIES OF BASLE TAKE NOTICE OF HIS BOOK. HE WRITES TWO DIALOGUES BY WAY OF APPENDIX TO IT AND LEAVES SWITZERLAND.
Failing to make any impression on the Swiss and German Reformers whose countenance he had been so anxious to gain, we have seen Servetus in his letter to Œcolampadius declaring his readiness to quit Basle, to which he must have returned, if it were only not said that he went as a fugitive, and giving something like an engagement to his correspondent to review and, reviewing, to modify or retract some things he had said in his book. That some such engagement was given we conclude from the letter of Œcolampadius to the magistrates of Basle, to which we shall refer immediately, and from which it would seem that it was through the forbearance, if not even the more friendly interference, of the Reformer that our author escaped arrest and imprisonment at this time. The seven books or chapters on erroneous ideas of the Trinity had not fallen stillborn from the press; neither had the presence of the writer in Basle passed unobserved. The book being seen as heretical in thehighest degree by the ministers, the presence of its writer among them was felt as matter of grievance by both clergy and laity; so that the Civic Council held it within the scope of their duties to take notice of the innovator, of whom they heard so much that was discreditable, and, by laying hands on him, either to make him pay in person then and there, or to send him away, like an infected bale, to spread his poison elsewhere.
Previous to acting, however, they thought it would be well to have the opinion of their chief Pastor, Œcolampadius, on what had best be done, and so requested him to advise with them on the subject. He replied by a long letter in which he recapitulates the chief topics discussed by Servetus in his treatise. ‘He, Œcolampadius, will do what he can to place the good man’s views before them,—if indeed he may venture to speak of the writer as a good man; for it seems that he strives at times as much to darken the light as to enlighten the darkness, mixing up incongruities rashly and not seldom stopping short of contradicting himself. He opposes the orthodox doctors continually, and uses certain words in an arbitrary and unusual sense. He denies the coeternity of the Father and the Son, a doctrine hitherto held sacred by all the Christian churches; and only recognises the sonship from the moment of the engenderment, or rather of the birth of Christ. He even derides the idea of God having a son from eternity, and askswhence the heavenly father had his wife, or whether he were of both sexes in himself? He will only recognise the eternity of the Son as anIdeain the divine mind: the Son was to be, but was not yet, until he appeared in the flesh. He will by no means concede that the Word of St. John was the Christ; yet he speaks of three persons in the one God; but it is with glozing and an arbitrary meaning attached to the word person, and with reasonings which, if they sometimes make for his views, are at other times opposed to them, he neither thinking nor speaking as do the apostles, and wresting the words of the fathers—of Tertullian and Irenæus especially—from the interpretation commonly put upon them.
‘Along with all this and much more that is objectionable, there are still some things in the book that are good; nevertheless as a whole it could not but offend me. God grant that the writer acknowledge the rashness which has led him to speak so unadvisedly as he has done of matters which transcend our human intelligence, and that he may live to amend what he has said. As to the book, it would be well perhaps that it were either totally suppressed, or were read by those only who are not likely to be hurt by objectionable writings. The errors he has fallen into acknowledged,he will retractin his writings—retractârit scriptis. Perhaps he was not himself aware of their extent, or they were not seen by him as of such importance as they are in fact. But I leave all toyour prudence and discretion, humbly commending myself and my work to your favour.’33
If we are to understand theretractârit scriptisof the above as a promise from Servetus to retract in a future work what he has said in his first, he certainly did not keep his word in the ‘Dialogi de Trinitate,’34which he published in the course of the following year. In the Preface to these dialogues, it is true, he informs the candid reader that he retracts all he had ‘lately written in the seven books of erroneous conceptions concerning the Trinity, not because what I say there is false, but because the work is imperfect and written as it were by a child for children. I pray you nevertheless to hold by so much as you find there that may help you to understand the subjects discussed. All that is barbarous, confused and faulty, ascribe to my inexperience and the carelessness of the printer. I would not that any Christian were offended by what I say; for God is used sometimes to make known his wisdom to the world by weak vessels. Look at the thing itself, therefore, I pray you, and if you take good heed, my stammering will prove no hindrance to you.’
The reputed printer of Servetus’s Treatise and Two Dialogues, Jo. Secerius, has no particular name as atypographer. But these little works are by no means incorrectly printed; they show few typographical errors—so few that they must almost certainly have been read for press by the writer himself. The printer therefore is not to be blamed for any shortcomings of the kind referred to by the author—if there be defect it is his own, and it was the matter not the manner that had been found fault with. But the Preface is apologetic in directions uncalled for, and is meaningless in fact. Servetus did not think himself a weak vessel; neither did he look on his work as the work of a child for children; and as for any retractation of his opinions, nothing seems to have been further from his mind. On the contrary the mysticism of the writer of the Fourth Gospel appears to have taken a firmer hold of our author than it had done before, and to have acted as fresh ferment to the mystical element so abundant in his proper nature. There may be modification of some of the views already enunciated, but from none of them is there recession. The opposition he met with from the leading Reformers seems even to have added point and precision to his writing. He is more outspoken than before, and is still less chary in the kind of language he uses towards opponents. The usual conception of apartitionedDeity he declares to be simply blasphemous; they who seriously entertain it are fools, and so blind that were Christ to come among them now and declare he was the Son of God, they would crucify him anew.The Dialogues, instead of any denial and retractation, are a reiteration and defence of almost all he has said in his first production; although, indeed, we do observe that where he can he occasionally approximates somewhat to more orthodox views; in that passage very notably where he speaks of the Son being of the same essence (homousios), and even consubstantial with the Father. (‘Dial.’ i., f.II, b.) But these are really no more than words set down under the varying impulses of mind to which the writer gave way, and are deprived of any meaning that might attach to them by something that has either gone before or that comes immediately after.
The discussion of Luther’s Justification by Faith, to which it must be presumed his attention had been particularly called by Œcolampadius as likely to be offensive to the Lutherans, is renewed in the Dialogues; and the writer is so far carried away by his own exaggerated estimate of the mental condition implied in faith or belief, that he seems even to acceptin totothe principle he would controvert. Though he is elsewhere and ever so emphatic in praise of good works or charity, we here find him not sparing in condemnation of those who hope through their doings of any kind to achieve salvation. Monks and nuns accordingly, who sin more especially in this direction and who by the assumption of peculiar habits and behaviour think to make themselves agreeable to God, are an especial abomination to him. Man, he declares, cannot be justifiedby the observance of vows or rules of any kind; for these are not written in the law of God, and in themselves are without significance. ‘A most pestilent thing it is, that Papal decrees and monastic vows are assumed as means of salvation. When men bind themselves by vows to particular observances, they virtually declare that the salvation they have through Christ is insufficient, and lay themselves fast in those bonds of the law from which Christ came to set them free.’
In spite of frequently recurring contradictions and something that is objectionable on the score of taste, we nevertheless think that no one, however little disposed to abet Servetus’s general views, could peruse these dialogues without coming to the conclusion that the writer was a man of a sincerely pious nature, who had read much, and reflected deeply, feeling it a necessity of his nature to expend himself in the mystical verbiage in which religious enthusiasm loves to robe itself as in a sufficient and seemly garment.
The seven Books and two Dialogues on the Trinity of Servetus have been spoken of as an attempt to hold a middle course between the Roman Catholic and the Reformed churches; and there may be something to warrant such a conclusion from what is said in the chapter ‘De Justitia Regni Christi.’ But Servetus’s Trinity is of another kind from that of either the older or the younger sister, and where not assimilable to the Neoplatonic ideas of Philo, it followed from the Pantheisticprinciples which, like deep thinkers in general, he had adopted. God to Servetus was the ἓν καὶ πᾶν, the One and the All; and if at any time he speaks of Christ as God, it is as a manifestation of the Divine in human form—adispensationin his own phraseology, amodein Spinozistic language. The Divine Unity, and its manifestation in the world in infinite modes, may be said to be the fundamental idea in the philosophical as well as the theological system of Servetus.35