SETTLEMENT AT VIENNE UNDER THE PATRONAGE OF THE ARCHBISHOP—RENEWAL OF INTERCOURSE WITH THE PUBLISHERS OF LYONS—SECOND EDITION OF PTOLEMY.
It was while resident at Charlieu that Villeneuve again met with Pierre Paumier, now Archbishop of Vienne, Dauphiny, whom he had known in Paris, who indeed had been among the number of his auditors when he lectured on geography and the science of the stars. Paumier had the reputation, well deserved as it appears, of being a lover of learning for its own sake, and fond of the society of men learned like himself. Thinking, we may presume, that one with the accomplishments of his old professor would be an addition to the society of the archiepiscopal city of Vienne, when he heard of Villeneuve’s presence in Charlieu as a practising physician, he sought him out, and pressed him to quit the narrower for the wider field. This, under such auspices, we can well imagine Doctor Villeneuve was nowise loth to do; so that we next hear of him installed at Vienne, with apartments found him in the precincts of the Palace, and so under the immediate patronage of the Archbishop.
Not overburthened with professional work at first, Villeneuve appears to have renewed, if he had not kept up, his connection with the publishers of Lyons; and, as a means of income, continued his literary labours in various directions for more than one of the fraternity. Among other works, the edition of ‘Ptolemy’ he had supervised for the Trechsels, when in their service in 1535, being exhausted, a second was required; and their old editor having already proved himself abundantly competent, overtures were made to him to undertake the work anew. A proposal of the kind we need not doubt was gladly received, and the Trechsels having set up a branch establishment at Vienne, and the Archbishop consenting to accept the dedication of the new ‘Ptolemy,’ our editor had an opportunity of saying something pleasant to his patron, and of showing himself advantageously to the public around him in connection with a handsome volume from a press of their own city. The work accordingly was entered on with alacrity; and as the editor was not only countenanced, but assisted by the Archbishop, himself no mean geographer, the new edition made its appearance in the course of 1541, amended and improved.51
If the first ‘Ptolemy’ of Michael Villanovanus had been seen as an improvement on its predecessors, his second was a marked advance upon it, and is interesting to us on many accounts. Though much lauded and commercially successful, the first edition, in a literary point of view, was still far from what it was capable of being made. The ornamentation of the volume, though profuse, was not highly artistic, and the wood-cuts had already done duty in various other publishing ventures. There was ample room for improvement both in the direction of greater accuracy of text and of better taste. In the re-issue, consequently, we find various alterations, and two or three omissions that are highly significant. It is printed on better paper, too, and new maps are added; the coarse wood-cuts are left out, and the text in various parts is amended. Altogether the volume is a very handsome one, and was obviously produced with every care to secure accuracy and elegance.
In his Dedication to the Archbishop, we have an assurance that life among the polished circles of Vienne had already had a mollifying influence on the hot-headed Michel Villeneuve of Parisian days. The polite terms in which, beside the Archbishop, all and sundryof mark and name in the city are spoken of, are particularly notable. We know how little there was of compliment in the words with which he took leave of his Swiss opponents, and imagine the sting there must be in the paper with which he bade the Parisian Faculty farewell. But now, beneath the wing of the great church dignitary, and referring to the time when as professor of geography and astrology he had had him among the number of his auditors, Villanovanus tells us that he is especially encouraged in his purpose to produce a more correct edition of the great geographer’s work, by the permission he has received to dedicate it to his patron, as well as by the assistance he has had from him in the amendment of numerous faulty passages.
‘For you,’ continues our Editor, addressing the Archbishop, ‘are the one among our church dignitaries I have known who, loving letters and favouring learned men, have given particular attention to geographical science. I am also incited to my work by the many favours I have received at your hand. Under what patronage but yours, indeed, could this work, amended, and printed at Vienne, appear, student as you are of ‘Ptolemy,’ and head of our Viennese society? Nor, sooth to say, will our ‘Ptolemy’ want a welcome from others about us interested in geography; among the foremost of whom I may name your relation John Paumier, prior of St. Marcel, and Claude de Rochefort, your vicar, both of them highly accomplished men, commended of all, and to whom I may say that Imyself owe as much in my sphere as students of geography owe to ‘Ptolemy.’ I must do no more than mention Joannes Albus, prior of St. Peter and St. Simeon; for I am forbidden to speak of his virtues. Neither must I make other than a passing allusion to the noble triad, your officials; for words would fail me to speak worthily of their great qualities; and of Doctor John Perell, your physician, my old fellow-student in Paris, so learned in philosophy and skilled in the languages—I can only say that one more apt than I were required fitly to speak his praise.’
From this we learn that Michael Villanovanus, all in laying on flattery somewhat thickly, could still show himself the grateful man; as ready to acknowledge kindness as we have known him apt to take fire at opposition and ready to resent what he held to be unworthy usage. But the matter is even more interesting to us, as giving us to know the kind of society Servetus frequented in Vienne, and the consequent esteem in which he must have been held. The ‘noble triad’ referred to, we imagine, may have consisted of M. Maugiron, the Lieutenant-General of Dauphiny; M. de la Cour, the Vibailly; and M. Arzelier, the Vicar-General.
Among the alterations and omissions to be observed in the new edition of the ‘Ptolemy,’ the most notable occur under the heads of Germany, France, and Judæa. The edition of 1535 was set about and produced shortly after he had been so unhandsomelyreceived, as he thought, by the Swiss and German Reformers; and we are therefore sorry, though not surprised, to find that disappointment and pique had left him with little inclination to say much in praise either of themselves or their respective countries. Hence the generally evil report he makes of Germany, and the notice of Switzerland as remarkable for nothing but the production of butchers! All this is either suppressed or toned down in the edition of 1541. The editor had had time for reflection; and under the soothing influences of the archiepiscopal city and professional success, he now makes a more favourable report of the countries and peoples he had formerly gone out of his way to decry and defame. Instead of the forest-encumbered and swampy land with its inclement sky of the former edition, Germany is now aregio amœna, with acœlum satis clemens—a pleasant country with quite a temperate climate, and all the damaging statements in regard to its several divisions and their peoples are omitted.
The graphic account we had formerly of the boastful, ignorant, and superstitious people of Spain is also left out in the reprint; but we have an added notice of the people of France which shows us how little nations change in the course of three hundred and fifty years. ‘Not only in the cities and country places,’ says our editor, ‘but even in single families, every Frenchman seems to think he has a right to rule over everybody else. The assertion of individual superiority is so universalthat every one among them would have every one else to do his bidding, he himself feeling bound to do the bidding of none.’
The Church and her favoured sons, the hierarchs thereof, having still thriven in the shadow of the throne, as Villeneuve was now living amid the clerical society of an archiepiscopal city, it was thought that the few words in the former edition, which seemed to question the efficacy of the ‘Royal Touch’ in curing scrofula, would be out of place. They are, therefore, now found modified. For the ‘I did not see that any were cured,’ we find ‘I have heard say that many were cured!’ The new edition, moreover, being dedicated to the Archbishop of Vienne, it was felt that any word in dispraise of the Holy Land would seem disrespectful and improper. All that is said in connection with the map of Palestine contradictory to the Bible account of Judæa as a land flowing with milk and honey, or as of signal beauty and fertility, is accordingly entirely expunged from the new impression.
These changes have been said to be due to warnings given by friends to Servetus, on the presumption, probably, that he could hardly have been living on terms of intimacy with many persons of note, both lay and clerical, without betraying something of the sceptical element that distinguished him at the outset of his career, and that got the mastery of him with such disastrous consequences at last. But we have no positiveintimation that Servetus ever failed to keep his counsel, or that he was known to a soul in Vienne, save as M. Michel Villeneuve, the physician. Calvin certainly knew him by no other name in Paris when they met there in 1534, a date at which we have surmised he had not yet read the ‘De Erroribus Trinitatis,’ and so escaped having his suspicions aroused through the sameness of the views propounded in that work, and those expressed by his acquaintance, Villeneuve, that he had its author, Michael Serveto, alias Revés, bodily before him.
That this was really the case is confirmed by the statement which he makes on his trial at Vienne, to the effect, that he had only been challenged by Calvin in the course of their correspondence, begun as many as fourteen years after the publication of his first book, with being no other than Servetus. Having read the ‘De Erroribus’ subsequently, Calvin did not fail to discover Michael Serveto under the cloak of Michael Villanovanus, his correspondent of Vienne, and may consequently, some time after the year 1546, have written to Cardinal Tournon, as said by Bolsec,52or hinted to a friend in Lyons, that they had an egregious heretic, the writer of the work on Trinitarian Error, living among them under an assumed name. But of so much as this we have no reliable assurance, and even if we had, it couldhave no reference to the year 1541, the date of publication of the second edition of Villanovanus’s ‘Ptolemy.’53
EDITION OF SANTES PAGNINI’S LATIN BIBLE, WITH COMMENTARY.
Servetus must have got through a very considerable amount of literary work during the earlier years of his residence at Vienne. His time not being then fully occupied by professional duties, he had leisure and certainly no lack of inclination for other work, so that he seems to have been kept well employed by the publishers of Lyons. Hardly had the second ‘Ptolemy’ seen the light, than we find another handsome volume in folio not only taking shape under his hands, but actually launched in the course of the following year, 1542. This was a new and elegant edition of the Latin Bible of the learned Santes Pagnini.54
Appreciating the naturally pious bent of Servetus’s mind, as we do, to edit the Bible, we imagine, must to him have been like rest to the weary, and we think of the delight with which he received the proposal of Hugo de la Porte, the publisher of Lyons, to undertake a task of the kind. In his own earliest work we have seen him speaking of the Bible as a ‘book fallen down from heaven, to be read a thousand times over, the source of all his philosophy and of all his science.’ But this is from the pen of the younger man; for study and after thought, with the privilege he possessed through his self-reliant spirit of reading without a foregone conclusion, enabled him by and by to discover that the accredited traditional interpretation of holy writ could not at all times be maintained without violence, not only to reason and experience, but to history and the plain meaning of the text. He came to the conclusion, in fact, that whilst the usual prophetical bearing ascribed to the Old Testament was ever to be kept in view, the text had a primary, literal, and immediate reference to the age in which it was composed, and to the personages, the events, and the circumstances amid which its writers lived.
In the Preface to his edition, consequently, we see that, having undertaken the responsible duty of editor,Villanovanus means to be no mere follower in the beaten track, but to take an independent course of his own. ‘They,’ he says, ‘who are ignorant of the Hebrew language and history are only too apt to overlook the historical and literal sense of the sacred Scriptures; the consequence of which is that they vainly and foolishly expend themselves in hunting after recondite and mystical meanings in the text where nothing of the kind exists.’ Before reading the prophets, in particular, he would therefore ‘have every one make himself acquainted not only with the Hebrew tongue, but with Hebrew history; for the prophets, without exception, followed history to the letter, although they also prefigured future events in their writings, led as they were by inspiration to conclusions having reference to the mystery of Christ. The power of the Scriptures, indeed, is of a fertilizing or prolific kind. Under a waning literal sense, they possess a vivifying spirit of renovation. It were, therefore, well that their meaning, apprehended as pointing in one direction, should not be overlooked as also pointing in another; and this the rather, seeing that the historical sense comes out ever the more clearly when the prospective bearing, which has Christ for its object, is kept in view—veiled under types and figures, indeed, and so not seen of the Jews, blinded by their prejudices, but now revealed to us in such wise that we seem to see the very face of our God.’
‘In our Commentaries,’ concludes the Expositor,‘it will consequently be found that we have made it our particular study to elicit and present the old historical, but hitherto neglected, sense of the Scriptures. In this view, and to make available the author’s annotations, of which he has left a great many, we have taken no small amount of pains—non parum est nobis desudatum. Nor, indeed, had we to do with his annotations only; for the text of the copy we followed is corrected in numberless places by the hand of the author himself. I may, therefore, venture to affirm that Pagnini’s translation, as it now appears, approximates more closely to the meaning and spirit of the Hebrew than any former version. But the Church, and those learned in the Hebrew tongue, must be the judges here—any others are incompetent.’
From what he says, Villanovanus would therefore lead us to believe that he had had the privilege of working from a copy corrected and annotated by Pagnini himself, the author of the translation. But on a somewhat careful collation of the Villanovanus edition of 1542 with that of Lyons of 1527-28 (theeditio princeps, we apprehend), and the reprint from this by Melchior Novesianus of Cologne, of 1541, we are forced on the conviction that Villanovanus followed no copy corrected and annotated by Pagnini, but the fine edition of Novesianus, admirably edited by the learned publisher himself. The text of this is in fact identical with that of Villanovanus, and the headings to the chapters and references to corresponding and corroborativetexts are all but uniformly alike in the two. There are no variorum readings, if we recollect aright, in the Novesianus; but neither are there any of the slightest significance in the Villanovanus—unless perchance the reader should think that the text is improved by Noah being directed in building the Ark to ‘pitch it with pitch’—picabis eam pice, instead of bitumen—bituminabis eam bitumine!
That Villanovanus followed Novesianus, and not any copy corrected and annotated by Pagnini, is, as it were, demonstrated by this, that each page of the Address to the Reader, with the single exception of the first, begins and ends with the very same word in the two editions—which could not have been accidental: the compositor followed the copy he worked from page for page, line for line, word for word. We are sorry, therefore, to find our editor taking credit to himself in directions where none was due, and seeking, as it might seem, to shelter himself under the pious cowl of the orthodox Pagnini for the new and daring interpretation he himself puts upon so many passages of the Psalms and Prophets. Pagnini, one of the most learned hebraists and classical scholars of his country, was also a thoroughly orthodox monk, and would assuredly have been not a little astonished, and hardly pleased, we imagine, could he have seen himself in the guise in which he is presented by Michael Villanovanus. Had we but a single note from the hand of the learned Italian—and to the best of our belief we have not one—itcould not have failed to be of the most rigidly orthodox kind, his own edition having theimprimaturof no fewer than two Popes, and a laudatory epistle from Jo. Franciscus Picus, nephew of the celebrated Joannes Picus de Mirandola, distinguished alike as a philosopher and theologian.
Villanovanus’s procedure in respect of the Pagnini Bible, on the face of the matter, is much to be regretted, and indeed is hardly to be understood. He may possibly have had an annotated copy of his author supplied him by his publisher; but if he had, in so far as we can see, he has followed Novesianus to the letter in his text and has given no comments but his own. The times in which Servetus lived, though different from ours in so many respects, were, as it seems, somewhat like them in so far as themeumandtuumin literature are concerned. Did we judge from the instance before us, we should say that they were still less respected three hundred years ago than they are in the present day. Calvin refers to Villanovanus’s ‘Pagnini’ in the course of the Geneva trial, and subsequently also in his ‘Déclaration pour maintenir la vraye foye.’ But he seems not to have known of the Novesianus edition, or he would certainly have challenged more than the comments, and had better grounds possibly than any he adduces for saying that the editor had dexterously filched—avait grippé beau et belle—five hundred livres from the publisher for his labour.
But all this, though illustrative of one element inthe character of the subject of our study, and not to be passed over by us, is of less moment than the insight we gain through the comments—assuredly referable to him alone—into the intellectual side of his nature. In so far as we know, Servetus is nowhere even named as a biblical critic and expositor; yet did he precede by more than a century Spinoza, Astruc, Simon, Eichhorn, and others, founders of the modern school of Scriptural exegesis. The Old Testament texts referred by the writers of the New Testament to events still in the womb of time—to the coming especially of a liberator from their misery for the people of Israel in the shape of an anointed King, the conception of a late epoch in Jewish history—Servetus maintained had individuals in view who were alive and influential when the words were written, although he also admitted that they had a further prophetical or prospective sense of the kind commonly ascribed to them.
But he who believed in judicial astrology was not likely to have freed himself from that other still accredited form of superstitious belief which leads mankind, without so much as the aspects of the heavens to guide them, to fancy they can see into futurity. He had not divined, as we have now come to know, that even the oldest portions of the Hebrew Scriptures, in the shape in which they have reached us, date from no more remote an age than that which followed the Babylonian Captivity; that we have the work of two different writers under the name of Isaiah, the second of whomlived during or after the reign of Cyrus; and that the Apocalyptic Book of Daniel was written long after the personages there darkly shadowed forth had lived and died, and the events referred to had come and gone.
The narratives of the Pentateuch appear to have been accepted as properly historical by our editor. He did not, any more than the commentators who came after him almost to our own day, see them as mythical tales about individuals who lived, if they lived at all, and events that occurred, if they ever did occur, thousands—tens of thousands of years before any account of them could possibly have assumed the shape of legend, much less have been committed to writing. He has little, however, to say on the five books ascribed to Moses, and those of the quasi-historical complexion that follow them. Still his note on the words put into the mouth of Balaam, which tell ofa star to come out of Jacob and a sceptre to arise out of Israel, is important. The prediction, as he interprets it, applies immediately to King David, though it has a farther prospective reference to Christ, with whose advent, as we know, it has long been all but exclusively connected. Our editor, however, was not helped by his superior knowledge of the stars to surmise that the writing was of a date long posterior to the reputed days of Balaam, the soothsayer of Mesopotamia, and Balak, king of Moab; that the predictions put into the mouth of the seer were all made after the events theypretend to foretell, and that King David had lived and died long before a word of the text was written; neither did he see that the writer who had King David in his eye could not have been thinking of an anointed king or captain who was only to appear some six or seven hundred years after Israel’s second sovereign had been gathered to his fathers.
Villanovanus is much more copious when he comes to the Psalms. The words in the second of our collection of these sacred lyrics, so much made of in dogmatic lore,Yet have I set my King upon my holy hill of Zion.... Thou art my son; this day have I begotten thee—he explains thus: ‘On the day when David had escaped from his enemy (Saul) he said, This day do I begin to live; at length I am king.’
The words in the fifth verse of that fine Psalm, the eighth,For thou hast made him a little lower than the angels, and hast crowned him with honour and glory, he also refers immediately to King David, who, in times of persecution, abased himself; but, subsequently victorious, was crowned at last.
The passages,In Jehovah I put my trust, andHow say ye to my soul, flee as a bird to your mountain, of Psalm xi., he refers to the time when David in fear of Saul escaped from the land of Judah.
The comment on the sixteenth verse of Psalm xxii.,They pierced my hands and my feet, is again applied to David, when, flying from his enemies, and scrambling like a four-footed beast over rugged and thorny places,his hands and feet were lacerated—fugiente David per abrupta, instar quadrupedis, manus ejus et pedes lacerabantur.
Sacrifice and offering thou didst not desire—Psalm xl. 6, signifies, says our commentator, that David, when a fugitive in the wilderness, offered no sacrifices.
In the verse,Thy throne, O God, is for ever and ever, Psalm xlv. 6, the wordGod, says our exponent, refers to Solomon, who, like Moses and Cyrus, is here styledDivus—God.
They gave me gall for my meat, and in my thirst they gave me vinegar as drink, of Psalm xlix. 22, says Villanovanus, is a passage referring to Nabal’s refusal and churlishness when David asked him for meat and drink.
The Lord said unto my Lord, Sit thou at my right hand until I make thine enemies thy footstool, Psalm cx. 1. ‘This refers to David and Solomon, types alike of Christ, when David, having set his son on the throne beside him, addressed him as My Lord, and styled him a priest after the order of Melchizedek.’
Whilst thus in these and in many other instances referring the statements met with in the Psalms to individuals living or dead at the time they were written, and to events then in progress or past, Villanovanus still imagines that everything said, besides its literal and immediate signification, is also typical of personages and events to come—a system of exposition that has been pushed beyond all reasonable lengths byignorance and superstition since his day. We may indeed be well assured that the writers of the Hebrew Psalms knew no more of what would happen five or six centuries after they were dust than we know of what will be going on in the world five or six hundred years after we are no more. Prophets, Seers, Diviners, Fortune-tellers and the like are ignored by the science of our age, although under the first of these designations they are still acknowledged by pious persons in the history of the past, and in its bearing on the religion of the present. The excuse for this is that the Prophets of Israel wereinspired, or exceptionally gifted, with the power of seeing into futurity. But God, as we now conceive God, makes no exceptions to his laws. As they are, so have they ever been, and so will they ever continue to be. Said not Servetus himself aright when he declared that out of man there was no Holy Spirit, or Spirit of Inspiration?
But it is not on the Psalms that Villanovanus’s exposition, remarkable as it is, appears the most noteworthy. It is when he comes to the writings of the Prophets, as they are styled, that he puts forth his strength and shows his learning.And it shall come to pass in the last days that Jehovah’s house shall be established on the top of the mountain, and all nations shall flow unto it, says Isaiah (ii. 2et seq.). These words, according to our expositor, refer to the reign of Hezekiah. Literally seen, they speak of the accession of Hezekiah, and the return of the captive Israelitesto Jerusalem, the Assyrians having suffered a signal defeat without a battle fought.
In like manner, commenting on the second verse of the fourth chapter of Isaiah, where it is said,In that day shall the branch of Jehovah be beautiful and glorious, he says it is still Hezekiah and events transpiring in his reign that are alluded to, the king nevertheless being to be seen as a type of Christ.
The remarkable fourteenth verse of chapter vii. of the same writer, of which so much has been made, Villanovanus refers immediately to the times in which it was written. Syria and Ephraim confederate, under their kings Rezin and Pekah, are at war with Judah and threatening Jerusalem, whose king, Ahaz, the Prophet comforts with the assurance that the invasion, however formidable it looks, will come to nothing, and bids him ask for a sign from Jehovah that such will be the case. But Ahaz declining to do so, the Prophet volunteers a forecast of what he declares will come to pass, saying,Behold, a virgin(Almah—a young marriageable woman)shall conceive and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel; and before the child shall know good from evil[arrive at years of discretion]the land will be freed from its enemies. ‘The Aramæans,’ says Villanovanus, ‘have come up in battle array against Jerusalem, and the prophet speaks of a young woman who shall conceive and bear a son, the young woman being no other than Abijah, about to become the mother of Hezekiah—strength or fortitude of God—andImmanuel—God with us—before whose reign the two kings, the enemies of Judah, will have been discomfited.’
TheFor unto us a child is born, &c., of chapter ix., he further refers to Hezekiah, for it was in his reign that Sennacherib and the Assyrians suffered such a signal defeat, the angel of Jehovah, according to the account, having slain in one night an hundred and four score and five thousand of them.
For they shall cry unto the Lord of Hosts in the land of Egypt, and he will send them a Saviour and he shall deliver them(Ib. xix. 20). ‘The Saviour,’ says Villanovanus, ‘is still no other than Hezekiah. Egypt as well as Judah, oppressed by the Assyrians, is relieved when the great army of Sennacherib is wrecked by the angel of Jehovah.’
Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened, and the ears of the deaf be unstopped(Ib. xxxv. 5),i.e.‘Liberation from the yoke of the Assyrians will do much towards giving the Jewish people clearer and better ideas of God.’
Comfort ye my people.... The voice of one crying in the wilderness, Prepare ye the way of the Lord, &c. (Ib. xl. 1-3). ‘These are words addressed to Cyrus, praying him to open a way through the desert for Israel, returning from the captivity of Babylon;’ and the ninth verse,O Zion, that bringest good tidings ... say unto the cities of Judah, Behold your God, he says, ‘refers literally to Cyrus, who is herestyled God; as does also the eighteenth verse,To whom will ye liken God(i.e.Cyrus),or what likeness will ye compare unto him? ‘In many striking ways,’ adds our expositor, ‘the prophet would lead the rude Jews, on their redemption from the Babylonian captivity, to cease from idolatry and to believe in God, the Creator of the world.’
He is despised and rejected of men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief. Surely he hath borne our griefs ... he was wounded for our transgressions, &c. (Ib. liii.). ‘In these passages, which also involve a great mystery referable to Christ,’ says Villanovanus, ‘the Prophet laments over Cyrus, slain, as it were, for the sins of the people, who, however, will suffer still more under Cambyses, his successor, when the building of the Temple, now begun, will be interrupted.’
Arise, shine, for thy light is come.... They from Sheba shall come, and shall bring gold and incense, &c., (Ib. lx.),i.e.‘taken literally, and as it stands, these words refer to the great days of the Second Temple, when Jerusalem was again in its glory.’
Who is this that cometh from Edom with dyed garments from Bozrah(Ib. lxiii.),i.e.‘Cyrus has inflicted severe chastisement on Edom, and brought back those who had been carried thither from Jerusalem into captivity, as we read in the fifteenth chapter, where it is said,The redeemed of the Lord shall return, and come with singing unto Zion.’
Behold the days will come, saith the Lord, when Ishall raise unto David a righteous branch(Jerem. xxiii. 5). The individual here referred to our exponent believes to be Zerubabel.
Know, therefore, that from the going forth of the commandment to restore and to build Jerusalem unto the Messiah, the Prince, is seven weeks, and three-score and two weeks ... and after three-score and two weeks shall Messiah be cut off and be no more(Daniel, ix. 25). ‘The times specified,’ says Villanovanus, ‘refer to those of the exile and the return of the captives by favour of Cyrus, who is the Messiah or Anointed One of God, that is here spoken of. Sixty-two weeks having passed from the great event, Cyrus will have been cut off, and all have gone to wreck again.’
Then shall Judah and Israel be gathered together, and appoint themselves one head, &c.,i.e.‘Judah and Israel will have become united for a season, as they were under Hezekiah.’
The words of the second verse of chapter vi.,After two days will he revive us; in the third day he will raise us up, ‘refer to the extraordinary discomfiture of the Assyrians in the reign of Hezekiah.’
For behold, in those days when I shall bring again the captivity of Judah and Jerusalem, I will also gather all the nations, &c. (Joel, iii. 1). ‘These words have a literal application to the defeat of the Assyrians and the glories of Hezekiah’s reign. Disasters many have befallen the chosen seed; but their oppressors will inturn be desolated, and Judah, restored, shall dwell for ever in Jerusalem.’
The texts inMicahgenerally spoken of as exclusively prophetical of Christ, our commentator thinks refer literally to Hezekiah and times subsequent to the defeat of the Assyrians.But thou, Bethlehem-Ephratah, out of thee shall he come forth to be a ruler in Israel, viz., ‘Hezekiah, who will deliver the people from the Assyrian.’
Rejoice greatly, O Daughter of Zion; shout, O Daughter of Jerusalem; behold, thy King cometh unto thee lowly, and riding upon an ass, even on a colt, the foal of an ass.This text, which is referred to Christ in Matthew (chapter xxii.), is connected by Villanovanus with the compassionate Zerubabel and his entrance into Jerusalem.
No one will be surprised to learn that these comments of the learned Villanovanus did not escape the notice of the great ecclesiastical centres of his day. That of Lyons is by-and-by found condemning outright both them and the book they pretend to illustrate. That of Madrid is content to order by far the greater number of the glosses to be expunged, but leaves the Bible itself available to the privileged; whilst that of Rome, less tolerant, not only condemns the expositions, but puts the book upon theIndex prohibitorius. The perusal of such comments, preparatory to drawing the pen through them, it was surmised by the far-sighted ecclesiastics of Rome might lead to independent thought,and this is precisely what the Church they represent would have every man, woman, and child in the land most carefully to eschew.
Calvin, we may imagine, was not likely to think any better of Villanovanus’s annotations than the heads of the Church of Rome; on the contrary, pinning his faith on its text as prophetical in the very strictest sense of the word, any attack on its sufficiency as a ground for dogmatic conclusion was felt by him to be a matter much more serious than by the Church of Rome, which sets its own traditions as equipollent to, where not even of higher authority than, that of the Bible on all matters of faith. To see the Scriptures of the Jews otherwise than as Calvin and the Reformers saw them was, in their eyes, to question the infallible book they had substituted for the infallible Pope so lately abandoned by them. We should therefore expect to meet Calvin, with occasion serving, making a point against our expositor on the ground of the Pagnini; and accordingly we find Servetus’s comments brought up against him in the most marked manner during his Geneva Trial, whilst in the Déclaration pour maintenir la vraye Foye, and the Defensio orthodoxæ Fidei, they are spoken of as impertinences and impieties, the Publisher being said at the same time to have been nothing less than cheated out of the money he paid the editor for his work. ‘Who,’ says Calvin, ‘shall venture to say that it was not thievish in the editor when he took five hundred livres in payment for the vain triflesand impious follies with which he encumbered almost every page of the book?’ (‘Opusc. Theol. Om.’ p. 703).
Notwithstanding the great Reformer’s denunciations, however, though we may not agree with Villanovanus in all his conclusions, nor approve of his passing without mention Melchior Novesianus, to whom he was indebted for his text, when we look on the beautiful volume he aided in producing, and think of him as the one man of his age who had independent opinions on the real or possible meaning of the poetical writings of the Hebrew people, consonant as these are in so many respects with the views entertained by the most advanced biblical critics of the present day, we are not disposed to think that he was overpaid. Had the Church dignitaries of Vienne seen the Pagnini Bible of Michael Villanovanus with the same eyes as the hierarchs of Rome, Madrid, and Lyons, the matter he added must needs have seriously compromised him with them. His numerous, excessively free, and highly heterodox interpretations of the Psalms and Prophets, nevertheless, in so far as we have been able to discover, appear to have lost Villeneuve neither countenance nor favour at Vienne, which is not a little extraordinary.
ENGAGEMENT AS EDITOR BY JO. FRELON OF LYONS—CORRESPONDENCE WITH CALVIN.
The Pagnini Bible out of hand, Villanovanus’s time would seem not yet to have been so fully occupied by his profession as to debar him from continuing to engage in a good deal of miscellaneous literary work for his friends the publishers of Lyons, among the number of whom we have now particularly to notice John Frelon, a man of learning, like so many of the old publishers, entertaining tolerant or more liberal views of the religious question, inclined towards, if not openly professing, the Reformed Faith, and the personal friend of Calvin.
For Frelon Villeneuve edited a variety of works, mostly, as it seems, of an educational kind, such as grammars, accidences, and the like; translating several of these from Latin into Spanish, for the laity; and, as the priesthood of the Peninsula appear not to have cultivated the classical languages of Greece and Rome to the same extent as those of France and Germany, also turning theSumma Theologiæof St. Thomas Aquinas, a work entitledDesiderius peregrinus, andanother, theThesaurus animæ Christianæ, into their vernacular for them.55Brought into somewhat intimate relationship with Villeneuve, whom Frelon at this time could not have known as Michael Servetus, the Reformation, its principles, its objects, and the views of its more distinguished leaders, would hardly fail to come up as topics of conversation between him and his learned editor. Frelon must soon have seen how much better than common Villeneuve was informed in this direction; and it has been said, not without every show of truth, that at his suggestion Servetus, under his assumed name of Villeneuve or Villanovanus, was led to enter on the correspondence with Calvin which we believe had so momentous an influence on his future fate. Frelon saw Villeneuve full of unusual ideas on many of the accredited dogmas of the Christian faith; and, not indisposed, though indifferently prepared, to discuss these himself, he very probably suggested the great Reformer of Geneva as the man of all others the most likely to feel an interest in them, as well as the most competent to give an opinion on their merits. Hence the correspondence which, begun in 1546, went on into 1547, and may even have extended into the following year.
That Frelon was the medium of communication between Villeneuve and Calvin is satisfactorily shown by the publisher’s letter to the Spaniard, inclosing one for him just received from the Reformer. The correspondence,however, must have already been started and Villeneuve been complaining to Frelon that he had been long without an answer to the last of his letters. Frelon, in turn, would seem to have written to Calvin, reminding him that his friend Villeneuve had for some time past been expecting to hear from him. Writing at length under his well-known pseudonym of Charles Despeville, in reply to Frelon, Calvin says:—
‘Seigneur Jehan, Your last letter found me on the eve of my departure from home, and I had not time then to reply to the inclosure it contained. I take advantage of the first moment I have to spare since my return, to comply with your wishes; not indeed that I have any great hope of proving serviceable to such a man, seeing him disposed as I do. But I will try once more if there be any means left of bringing him to reason, and this will happen when God shall have so worked in him that he become altogether other than he is. I have been led to write to him more sharply than is my wont, being minded to take him down a little in his presumption; and I assure you there is no lesson he needs so much to learn as humility. This may perhaps come to him through the grace of God, not otherwise, as it seems. But we too ought to lend a helping hand. If God give him and us such grace as to have the letter I now forward turn to profit, I shall have cause to rejoice. If he goes on writing to me in the style he has hitherto seen fit to use, however, you will only lose your time in soliciting me farther in his behalf; for I have other business that concerns me more nearly, and I shall make it matter of conscience to devote myself to it, not doubting that he is a Satan who would divert me from studies more profitable. Let me beg of you therefore to be content with what Ihave already done, unless you see most pressing occasion for acting differently.‘Recommending myself to you and praying God to have you in his keeping, I am your servant and friend—‘Charles Despeville.[Geneva] ‘this 13 of February, 1546.’
‘Seigneur Jehan, Your last letter found me on the eve of my departure from home, and I had not time then to reply to the inclosure it contained. I take advantage of the first moment I have to spare since my return, to comply with your wishes; not indeed that I have any great hope of proving serviceable to such a man, seeing him disposed as I do. But I will try once more if there be any means left of bringing him to reason, and this will happen when God shall have so worked in him that he become altogether other than he is. I have been led to write to him more sharply than is my wont, being minded to take him down a little in his presumption; and I assure you there is no lesson he needs so much to learn as humility. This may perhaps come to him through the grace of God, not otherwise, as it seems. But we too ought to lend a helping hand. If God give him and us such grace as to have the letter I now forward turn to profit, I shall have cause to rejoice. If he goes on writing to me in the style he has hitherto seen fit to use, however, you will only lose your time in soliciting me farther in his behalf; for I have other business that concerns me more nearly, and I shall make it matter of conscience to devote myself to it, not doubting that he is a Satan who would divert me from studies more profitable. Let me beg of you therefore to be content with what Ihave already done, unless you see most pressing occasion for acting differently.
‘Recommending myself to you and praying God to have you in his keeping, I am your servant and friend—
‘Charles Despeville.
[Geneva] ‘this 13 of February, 1546.’
This is surely neither an indifferent nor an unreasonable letter; yet does it give us to know that the epistle it enclosed, both in manner and matter, was likely to give offence to one with the haughty and self-sufficing nature of Michael Servetus. He had addressed the Reformer on transcendental dogmatic subjects, and probably urged his views with the warmth that strong conviction lends to language, and without anything like the deferential tone to which Calvin was accustomed. This proved particularly distasteful to the head of the Church of Geneva, who had certainly thought as deeply, and may even have entertained as serious misgivings, on some of the topics propounded, as his correspondent. Hence the unwontedsharpnessof the reply; hence, also, the fire which Villeneuve caught at being lectured like a schoolboy; and hence, in fine, the irritating, disrespectful, and regrettable character on either side of the correspondence that followed.
In transmitting Calvin’s letter to Villeneuve, Frelon addresses him thus:—
‘Dear Brother and Friend! You will see by the enclosed why you had not sooner an answer to your letter. Had I had anything to communicate at an earlier date, I should not have failed to send to you immediately, as I promised. Be assured that I wrote to the personage in question, and that there was no want of punctuality on my part. I think, however, that with what you have now, you will be as well content as if you had had it sooner. I send my own man express with this, having no other messenger at command. If I can be of use to you in anything else, I beg to assure you, you will always find me ready to serve you. Your good brother and friend, Jehan Frelon.‘To my good brother and friend, master Michael Villanovanus, Doctor in medicine, Vienne.’
‘Dear Brother and Friend! You will see by the enclosed why you had not sooner an answer to your letter. Had I had anything to communicate at an earlier date, I should not have failed to send to you immediately, as I promised. Be assured that I wrote to the personage in question, and that there was no want of punctuality on my part. I think, however, that with what you have now, you will be as well content as if you had had it sooner. I send my own man express with this, having no other messenger at command. If I can be of use to you in anything else, I beg to assure you, you will always find me ready to serve you. Your good brother and friend, Jehan Frelon.
‘To my good brother and friend, master Michael Villanovanus, Doctor in medicine, Vienne.’
It is matter of deep regret that with the exception of the first communication of Calvin to Villeneuve, which is in the form of an essay rather than a familiar epistle, and was written some time before the stinging missive sent through Frelon, we have nothing from him that would have enabled us to judge of the general style and character of his letters, though of this we may form an estimate from his subsequent writings. Calvin was far too much engaged to make copies of his letters, and we may feel certain that Villeneuve, on the first intimation of danger threatening him from the authorities of Vienne, destroyed every scrap of writing he had ever had from the Reformer, calculated as it was to compromise him in the eyes of Roman Catholics. Forced, for the sake of his French correspondents, to resort to a pseudonym, Calvin had probablyaddressed Villeneuve in his proper name. The letter to Frelon and the one from Frelon to Villeneuve must have been overlooked, or thought to contain nothing that could be adversely interpreted, and so found their way to the Judicial Archives of Vienne, whence they were recovered and published by Mosheim.56
The letters of Villeneuve to Calvin, or a certain number of them, at all events, have been transmitted to us by their writer in a section of his work on the Restoration of Christianity; and we turned to them with the interest of expectation, thinking we might there find a key to the singular and persistent hostility with which Calvin shows himself to have been animated towards his correspondent. Nor were we disappointed. The style of address indulged in by Villeneuve, as the correspondence proceeds, is as if purposely calculated to wound, if not even to insult, a man in the position of John Calvin, conscious of his own superiority, jealous of his authority, and become so sensitive to everything like disrespectful bearing on the part of those who approached him. But of deference or respect, save at the outset, there is not a trace in any of the letters of Villeneuve. On the contrary, they have often an air of something like familiarity that must have been extremely disagreeable to Calvin. Add to this the unseemly and disparaging epithets with which he pelts the irritable Reformer, and we have warrant enoughfor our assumption that, mainly out of this unfortunate epistolary encounter, was the enmity engendered which took such hold of Calvin’s mind as led him to see in a mere theological dissident a dangerous innovator and deadly personal foe.
The correspondence at the outset, however, had nothing of the unseemly character it acquired as it proceeded. Villeneuve approached the Reformer at first as one seeking aid and information from another presumed most capable of giving both; and this was precisely the style of address that suited Calvin. The subjects on which he desired the Reformer’s opinion were theological, of course, and of great gravity, involving topics of no less moment than the sense in which the Divinity and Sonship of Christ, the Doctrine of Regeneration, and the Sacraments of Baptism and the Lord’s Supper, were to be understood.
In a letter to a friend of a later date Calvin speaks as if he believed that these questions had been proposed in mockery, or to get him into difficulty; but this was an afterthought, and when he had come to persuade himself that Servetus was a man devoid of all religious principle. Nothing of any suspicion of the kind he hints at appears in his reply to the first communication he received, for it is sober, earnest, and to the point, each subject being taken up in succession and discussed, now in conformity with his own particular views, and then with the interpretation of the Churches.
Servetus’s questions to Calvin, three in number, were propounded categorically, and in the following order:—
1st.—Was the man Jesus, who was crucified, the Son of God; and what is the rationale of the Sonship (filiatio)?
2nd.—Is the Kingdom of heaven in man; when is it entered; and when is regeneration effected?
3rd.—Is Baptism to be received in faith, like the Supper; and in what sense are these institutions to be held as the New Covenant?
To the first, Calvin replies: ‘We believe and confess that Jesus Christ, the man who was crucified, was the Son of God, and say that the Wisdom of God, born of the Eternal Father before all time, having become incarnate, was now manifested in the flesh. Therefore do we acknowledge Christ to be the Son of God by his humanity; therefore, also, do we say that he is God—sed ideo quod Deus. As by his human nature, he is engendered of the seed of David, and so is said to be the Son of David; by parity of reason, and because of his divine nature, is he the Son of God. Christ, however, is One, not Two-fold; he is at once the Son of God and the Son of Man. You own him as the Son of God, but do not admit the oneness, save in a confused way. We, who say that the Son of God is our Brother, as well as the true Immanuel, nevertheless acknowledge in the One Christ the Majesty of God and the Humility of man. But you, confounding these,destroy both; for, acknowledging God manifest in the flesh, you say the divinity is the flesh itself, the humanity God Himself.’
To the second he answers: ‘The Kingdom of God, we say, begins in men when they are regenerated; and we are said to be regenerated when, enlightened by faith in Christ, we yield entire obedience to God. I deny, however, that regeneration takes place in a moment; it is enough if progress be made therein even to the hour of death.’
To the third he says: ‘We do not deny that Baptism requires faith; but not such as is required in the communion of the Supper; and in respect of Baptism we see it as nugatory until the promise of God involved in the rite is apprehended in faith.’ He concludes by assimilating the sacraments of Baptism and the Lord’s Supper to the Circumcision and Passover of the olden time.
Calvin, we thus see, addressed himself not only to the questions sent, but also in answer to the letter which doubtless accompanied them, in which the writer must have given some intimation of his own views.
That Calvin’s communication, couched in rigidly orthodox terms, though unobjectionable in style, was not calculated to satisfy Villeneuve, we cannot doubt. His mind was already as thoroughly made up—even more thoroughly made up, we apprehend, on some of the points advanced—than Calvin’s. We are not surprised, therefore, to find that the Genevese Reformer’sexpositions were repudiated as little satisfactory by the physician of Vienne, or to discover that the correspondence on his part was not suffered to drop. He appears to have replied immediately, and must have written in sequence no fewer than thirty letters to Calvin on his favourite theological subjects, so many being printed in the ‘Christianismi Restitutio.’ In answer to these Calvin must also have sent him more than one or two, though certainly many fewer than thirty; for by the letter to Frelon, written evidently at an early period of the correspondence, we see him already weary of it.
With his hands more than full in administering the affairs of the Genevese Church, holding his political opponents the Libertines in check at home, and corresponding with friends and the heads of all the other Reformed Churches abroad, it is not wonderful that, besides feeling disquieted by the matter and offended with the manner of Villeneuve’s addresses, he had soon made up his mind to have nothing more to do with the writer. He saw, moreover, that he made no impression on him, each new epistle being, as he says to a friend, but ‘a wearisome iteration of the same cuckoo note.’ Calvin’s vocation, however, was to be helpful in what he believed to be God’s work, and to preach the Gospel as he apprehended it. True to his trust, therefore, and by way of meeting his troublesome correspondent’s further importunities,—as a balsam competent to heal the wounds and strengthen the weakplaces in the soul of the distempered man, he seems to have thought he might escape further molestation by referring him to his own ‘Institutions of the Christian Religion,’ his master work, the canon of the Church of which he was the founder and acknowledged head. In this view, as we venture to presume, Calvin sent Villeneuve a copy of his ‘Institutions,’ and referred him to its pages for satisfactory replies to all his propositions.
It is impossible to imagine that Servetus had continued until this time unacquainted with Calvin’s writings; he had doubtless read them all; but he may not have made the ‘Institutiones Religionis Christianæ’ the subject of the particular study on which he was now forced, as it were, by its author, and with the result that might have been foreseen: there was hardly a proposition in the text that was not taken to pieces by him, and found untenable, on the ground both of Scripture and Patristic authority.
In the course of the correspondence hitherto, Calvin had stood on the vantage ground, as critic of his correspondent’s views; but matters were now reversed, for Villeneuve became the critic of the Reformer. He by and by returned the copy of the ‘Institutions,’ copiously annotated on the margins, not only in no terms of assent, but generally with the unhappy freedom of expression in which he habitually indulged, and so little complimentary to the author himself, as it seems, that Calvin, in writing to a friend and in language notover-savoury, says:—‘There is hardly a page that is not defiled by his vomit.’ The liberties taken with the ‘Institutions,’ we may well imagine, were looked on as a crowning personal insult by Calvin; and, reading the nature of the man as we do, they may have been that, super-added to the letters, which put such rancour into his soul as made him think of the life of his critic, turned by him into his calumniator, as no more than a fair forfeit for the offence done.
It was at this time precisely, as it appears, that Calvin wrote that terribly compromising letter to Farel, so long contested by his apologists, but now admitted on all hands—as indeed how could it be longer denied, seeing that it is still in existence?—in which he says: ‘Servetus wrote to me lately, and beside his letter sent me a great volume full of his ravings, telling me with audacious arrogance that I should there find things stupendous and unheard of until now. He offers to come hither if I approve; but I will not pledge my faith to him; for did he come, if I have any authority here, I should never suffer him to go away alive.’57
Nor is this the only letter written at this time byCalvin which shows with what despite he regarded Servetus. Jerome Bolsec, a quondam monk, now a physician, opposed to the Papacy and but little less hostilely inclined to Calvin, speaking of the Reformer’s persecution of Servetus—‘an arrogant and insolent man, forsooth,’—and of Servetus having addressed a number of letters to him along with the MS. of a work he had written, and a copy of the ‘Institutions of the Christian Religion,’ full of annotations little complimentary to the author,—goes on to say: ‘Since which time Calvin, greatly incensed, conceived a mortal antipathy to the man, and meditated with himself to have him put to death. This purpose he proclaimed in a letter to Pierre Viret of Lausanne, dated the Ides of February (1546). Among other things in this letter, he says: “Servetus desires to come hither, on my invitation; but I will not plight my faith to him; for I have determined, did he come, that I would never suffer him to go away alive.” This letter of Calvin fell into my hands by the providence of God, and I showed it to many worthy persons—I know, indeed, where it is still to be found.’ Bolsec says further that Calvin wrote to Cardinal Tournon denouncing Servetus of heresy, some time before making use of William Trie in the same view to the authorities of Lyons and Vienne, and that the Cardinal laughed heartily at the idea of one heretic accusing another. ‘This letter of Calvin to Cardinal Tournon,’ says Bolsec in continuation, ‘was shown to me by M. du Gabre, the Cardinal’s secretary.William Trie also wrote several letters to Lyons and Vienne at the instigation of Calvin, which led to the arrest of Servetus; but he escaped from prison.’
These statements of Bolsec, like the letter to Farel, have been called in question and their truth denied by Calvin’s apologists; but they tally in every respect with what else we know, and explain some things that would have remained obscure without them. If Calvin wrote to Farel in the terms he certainly did, we have no difficulty in believing that he addressed hisalter ego, Viret, in the same way. What is said of the letter to Cardinal Tournon, also, has every appearance of truth. The Cardinal took no notice of the heresy proclaimed from such a quarter as Geneva; or if he hinted at the matter to his friend the Archbishop of Vienne, Paumier’s good report of Doctor Villeneuve put a stop to further inquiry.58
More has probably been made of the letter to Farel, by the enemies of Calvin, than is altogether fair. Grotius, who was the first to notice it, says: ‘It shows that Antichrist had not appeared by Tiber only, but by Lake Leman also.’ When Calvin wrote to Farel, however, he did not contemplate the likelihood of Servetus ever falling into his hands. Neither, indeed, though grievously offending, had the Spaniard yetshown himself utterly incorrigible, a lost creature, fore-ordained of God, as it seemed, to perdition. At the time Calvin wrote the letter of February, 1546, to Farel