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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
May 11, 2014
Michael Servetus was one of the martyrs of our faith. He lived during the Reformation and wrote a pamphlet called “On the Errors of the Trinity.”
This is a story of the birth pains of free religion. It is a story of dangerous ideas, the clash of politics and passion. It is the story of how hard it is to control people, how impossible it is to control ideas, even when you are trying to control them in yourself.
Michael Servetus was born in Spain to a family of minor nobility. He was a prodigy, speaking French, Greek, and Latin by the time he was 13. (1524)
This was a time of religious evolution on the Continent. In 1517, when Servetus was 8, Martin Luther wrote a protest about the Rome raising funds for war and renovations by selling indulgences. Those were like an investment in your heavenly future — if you bought a small one you would be forgiven for a small sin, a large one forgave a large sin. You could buy relatives out of Purgatory where they were living in torment. It was big business in the Middle Ages. Martin Luther, a monk in Wittenberg, wrote 95 points of disagreement about how sins were forgiven, and nailed them to the door of the church. This wouldn’t have been so effective if another element had not been thrown into the mix: the printing press.
Before the 1500’s, a book had to be hand copied. Only the very rich could afford one or two of them. Most people couldn’t read anyway. After it was invented, print shops were set up all over the place, looking for things to publish. Luther’s theses were copied and they sold out immediately. He began to write more. Erasmus, the famous humanist wit, was being read widely. Universities were springing up everywhere, as every Prince now wanted to set up a center of learning in his province.
The Church was losing control. In Spain, it had become overwhelmed with the number of Jews and Muslims that had poured into the country. When they wouldn’t convert to Christianity, they were exiled or slaughtered. The Spanish Inquisition is famous for its vicious horrors.
It was against this background that Servetus, at fourteen, was sent to the University of Toulouse to be secretary to a famous scholar. Toulouse was a conservative town, so his parents felt safe sending him there, but, unbeknownst to them, the U. was a hotbed of radical thought. Michael essentially was given a private course with his boss, reading Erasmus, reading Luther. Printed Bibles were also to be had, which the students were not supposed to read, so they read them in secret. Somehow Servetus had picked up enough Hebrew to discuss the meaning of the Jewish Scriptures. Hebrew had been a forbidden language because the church wanted people to read the Bible only in its approved translation. There is even speculation that he learned Arabic, as he made several references to the Koran in his writing.
Servetus knew that not long before he was born, 800,000 Jews had been banished from Spain, and thousands of Muslims had been burned at the stake in Spain, because they would not accept the Trinity. He reasoned that if Christianity could correct that doctrine, then great numbers of Jews and Muslims, who already believed in one God, would be more inclined to convert. In reading the Bible, he was struck by the absence pf any mention of this thing that had caused so much strife and pain. When he was 20, he published a piece called “One the Errors of the Trinity.” It was printed to be small, about 3×6, so it could be stashed away fast if it had to be. A thousand copies sold out immediately. In it he said that God had created Jesus and that Jesus had become divine through his actions on earth. He thought you shouldn’t be baptized as an infant, as if the priest’s actions had the power to save your soul. He thought you should have to wait until you were twenty (the age he was then) and had some moral sense. He wrote that the Holy Spirit was the divine part of the human being. The Spanish Inquisition wanted their young man home for trial. He headed up to Switzerland, where the Protestants were establishing power in the towns of Basel and Geneva. Invited to live with a powerful leader, he argued with him about the trinity so rudely, so insistently, insulting and calling names, that after 10 months he was thrown out of that house and that town had to move on
He moved to Lyons to work for a printer, and worked on printing Ptolemy’s Geography. With his great scholarship, he actually improved this book. He couldn’t help adding his own opinions to the book. He wrote, “The English are brave, the Scots fearless, the Italians vulgar, the Irish rude, inhospitable, barbarous and cruel. On the map of Germany, he wrote ‘É all Germany are gluttons and drunkards.” (p.105, Wilbur) He was greatly admired in Lyon but he got into trouble again when he began discussing religion. And so he fled to Paris in 1536, changed his name to Villeneuve, and attended the University to study medicine. What was happening in the world then? Henry the 8th was founding the Church of England because Rome wouldn’t grant him the divorce he wanted. Meanwhile, Michael Servetus, putting himself through school lecturing on geography, astronomy and mathematics, became a respected doctor living as a good son of the Catholic Church (except for the time when he was censured by the Inquisition in France for using astrology with his medicine). He edited a new Latin translation of the Bible, and became the famous Dr. Villeneuve, consulted by nobles and potentates of the Church.
He couldn’t leave theology alone, though, when the reformer John Calvin began publishing his Institutes of the Christian religion (which we had to read in seminary). Dr. Villeneuve began writing to Calvin, arrogantly, with the same style that had gotten him in trouble as Servetus in his twenties. As in the past, he was not so much interested in hearing what Calvin had to say as he was in correcting Calvin’s errors, and he used terribly impolite language. By then, Calvin had gained considerable power as the leader of Geneva. Switzerland. Calvin wrote to a third party in 1547 that if this Servetus came his way, “he would never let him get away alive.” (Wilbur)
People who held different beliefs concerning the Christian religion faced overwhelming dangers. Unitarian scholar Earl Morse Wilbur notes that by the year 1546, 30,000 Anabaptists had been put to death in Holland and Friesland alone, because of their faith. (A History of Unitarianism: Socinianism and its Antecedents)
Servetus broke off this correspondence with Calvin for four years, during which he revised and prepared for the press his final work, The Restitution of Christianity, which was printed anonymously in 1552. Within the body of his new book, Servetus made a major contribution to the study of medicine. In illustrating a theological point, he described the pulmonary circulation of the blood from the right chamber of the heart to the lungs. He is given credit as possibly the first to discover, and definitely the first to publish this piece of medical knowledge..
No one noticed the medicine as it was surrounded by shocking and dangerous theological ideas. Then as now, the churches who are all about control worried about his soul and those of the readers he would influence. Then, as now, dangerous ideas get you consigned to the flames. Actual ones in those days, eternal flames of hellfire in these days. Servetus was a wanted man.
Communications between Protestant Geneva and the Catholic Inquisition in France–then deadly enemies– eventually led to the arrest, examination, and incarceration of Servetus/Villeneuve in France. Realizing his great peril, Servetus managed to escape from prison, and to disappear from sight. His French trial went on without him for the next ten weeks. The errors of his work were duly noted, and sentence was pronounced: that he should be burned alive by slow fire. Since he wasn’t available, this sentence was carried out on his effigy.
That summer Michael Servetus was keeping out of sight, moving slowly towards Italy, where he might have been safe. There weren’t many countries where he wasn’t being hunted. He made the choice to pass through Switzerland. Who knows why he stopped in Geneva. On a Sunday, when everyone, including strangers, was required to go to church. Someone reported his presence to Calvin, who had him thrown in jail.
There was a trial, examining Servetus’ heresies, and it appears Servetus thought he might win out or at least receive some minor punishment such as a fine or banishment. Finally, after much debate, Servetus was found guilty. Calvin himself pushed for a more merciful beheading, but his Council insisted on the fire. On Oct 27th, the sentence was carried out, Servetus was burned with his book chained to his ankle.
Widespread repulsion at the way he had died gave more energy to the movement of free religion — free from the control of any church. The man could be killed, but his ideas could not. The books were destroyed, all but three copies, which managed to survive and now exist in translation. Ideas have power, and your truth has power. How can we stay silent when we feel the Spirit call us to speak our free religion?
Three hundred years after his death, Unitarian minister William Ellery Channing could and did speak openly: “I call that mind free which jealously guards its intellectual rights and powers, which does not content itself with a passive or hereditary faith.” We sometimes forget how much blood was shed before such freedom was possible. Let us not forget. That is our heritage.
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