Out of the Flames Read online

  His first assignment for the Trechsels in Vienne was a second edition of the Geography, which Servetus dedicated to Palmier, who evidently assisted in the work. “For you,” he wrote, “are the one among our church dignitaries I have known who, loving letters and favoring learned men, have given particular attention to geographic science. I am also incited to my work by the many favors I have received at your hand.” As beautiful as the 1535 edition had been, the 154.1 was even better. The paper was of a higher quality, the woodcuts were improved, maps were added, and the commentaries supplemented.

  This second edition was as significant for what was omitted as for what was added. Opposite the map of Palestine, for example, where formerly had been inserted the refutation of the milk and honey legend, there was… nothing, no commentary whatever. As for the passage where Servetus had cast doubt on the king's ability to cure scrofula by touch, “I have never seen this” was replaced by “I have heard this is so.” But nowhere was the new, kindlier Michael Servetus more in evidence than in the few lines he appended to the address to the reader:

  This world and all its kingdoms wouldst thou know,

  What mighty rivers to blue oceans flow,

  What mountains rise, what cities grace the lands,

  Thick-peopled, rich with toil of busy hands,—

  —If such lore thou hast a mind to call,

  Open this book, and there survey it all.

  Then, in 154.1, he was asked to edit a one-volume edition of the Pagnini Bible.

  THE PAGNINI BIBLE “WAS THE work of Santes Pagnino, a Dominican friar born in 1470. Pagnino devoted twenty-five years of his life to the completion of a Latin version of the Bible translated from the original Greek and Hebrew and divided, for the first time, into chapters. It ran to seven volumes and was sponsored by Popes Leo X and Clement VII.

  Although Pagnino intended his Bible to be a literal rendering of the original Scriptures, the participation of the Church ensured that any questionable passages would come down on the side of orthodoxy. The Bible was published in Lyon in 1527, and Pagnino spent the last seven years of his life in the city.

  When Pagnino died, a local burgher decided to finance a new, one-volume edition of his Bible to commemorate his death. Whoever undertook to edit the project would obviously require a thorough knowledge of Hebrew, and Servetus came up as the most likely candidate.

  Up until this point, Servetus had maintained his image as a devout Catholic. He went to Mass like everybody else and counted the archbishop and the cardinal as his friends. He could easily have lived out the rest of his life in comfort and success. There is every indication that he intended to do so… until he accepted the job as editor of the Pagnini Bible.

  The first Servetus edition of the Pagnini Bible was actually rather tame, sticking largely to the traditional interpretation of the Scriptures. However, he could not resist including a preface in which he criticized biblical scholars for not accepting the Scriptures in their literal form but instead insisting on seeking more mystical meanings. He didn't specifically mention the Trinity, of course, so no one made the connection. He went on to say that a study of Hebrew and ancient Jewish culture could clarify many of the inconsistencies that had grown up around orthodox interpretation:

  They 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.

  No one seemed to take issue with this statement, and soon after, Servetus signed a contract to undertake the much more arduous task of editing a full seven-volume edition. It would take him three years. In this larger edition, he made significant alterations in the translation in order to demonstrate that the Scriptures were not being applied literally by either Rome or the reformers. He attacked the notion that passages in the Old Testament prophesied those in the New. One correction in particular was to cause a stir. In Isaiah 7:14, there is a passage that officially read, “Behold, a virgin shall conceive and bear a son.” Servetus corrected the misapplication of the Hebrew and substituted the proper translation, “a young marriageable woman,” for “virgin.” As a result of the changes, the Villanovanus edition of the Pagnini Bible was put on the restricted list in Louvain and also prohibited by the Inquisition in Spain.

  It did not, however, affect Servetus's status in Vienne. He remained publicly admired and respected. But privately, his interest in theology was rekindled. All the old passions came surging back. Furiously, secretly, he began once again to scribble down his own thoughts on the nature of Christianity.

  IN ADDITION TO “WORKING for the Trechsels, Servetus freelanced for other publishers. One of these, Jean Frellon, for whom Servetus translated Latin grammars into Spanish, was a practicing Catholic who privately leaned toward the reform movement. The two became friends, and Servetus, once again in the grip of his own theological fury, violated his own rule and discussed religion.

  Servetus, with his encyclopedic knowledge of the Scriptures, was getting the better of Frellon in every argument. Casting around for a more competent authority to help him pursue the discussion, Frellon had an idea. He happened to be a good friend of one of the great biblical scholars in Europe, he told Servetus. He was sure that his friend would find Dr. Villeneuve's ideas interesting, and that the doctor would find his friend to be the perfect person with whom to discuss these lofty matters. Frellon even offered to write a letter of introduction.

  Servetus agreed. He enclosed a letter of his own with that of Frellon.

  The letters were addressed to the Reformer of Geneva, John Calvin.

  CHAPTER TEN

  AFTER THE AFFAIR of the Placards in 1534, Calvin had fled to Basel. He stayed about a year under the alias Martianus Lu-canius (an anagram for Calvinus), and it was here that the In-stitutes was first published by Thomas Platter. The preface was an open letter to Francis, “the Most Christian King of France,” and was a defense against the charge then being put forward by the king that the Paris reformers were all extremists.

  By early 1536, Francis was again seeking to court the German Protestants as a potential second front against Charles, and had invited Bucer and Melanchthon to Paris, supposedly to help devise a plan of reform for the French Church. Bucer and Melanchthon refused. As it seemed, however, that Francis might be forced to soften his domestic opposition to the Protestants, Calvin decided to lay the groundwork for his return to France. He left Basel for Italy and the court of Renée, the duchess of Ferrara. The duchess was the daughter of Louis XII, and cousin and partisan of Marguerite. Many of the French reformers who had not fled to Basel had found refuge instead with Renée, and Calvin, still hoping for a high position in the reform movement when it moved back to France, knew that her patronage would prove helpful. He secured a job as her private secretary under the pseudonym Charles Despeville and made the acquaintance of other useful people, such as the poet Clément Marot, whose poems he would later borrow, set to music, and publish in a book as psalms appropriate for church choirs.

  Unfortunately, the duchess was married to Duke Hercules II, son of Lucrezia Borgia, grandson of Pope Alexander VI, and an orthodox of the old school. Hercules was not pleased with his wife's new court. Calvin saw trouble ahead, and when Francis declared a six-month amnesty in May 1536, he immediately left for Paris. (He showed excellent timing, for soon afterward, when one of Renée's entourage publicly refused to go to Mass, Hercules called in the authorities and had everybody in the house arrested. Renée had to resort to pleading with the pope to save her house guests, while her husband petitioned him to have them all burned. The duchess won that round.)

  Francis's amnesty allowed any known dissenter to return to France without fear of prosecution, but anyone who wished to stay in the country beyond the six months had to reaffirm allegiance to Rome. Calvin used this grace period to sell the property in Noyon tha
t he had inherited from his father, gather up his younger brother Antoine, his half-sister Marie, and a few other sympathetic townspeople, and head for Strasbourg.

  However, after Charles's invasion of Provence, there was fighting along the route to Strasbourg. Calvin and his band ended up being diverted and spending a night in Geneva instead.

  SIXTEENTH-CENTURY GENEVA was a brawling, hard-drinking commercial center, a town of middle-class merchants and tradesmen, prosperous without being wealthy, more Cleveland than cosmopolitan. For more than a hundred years, Geneva had been ruled by a prince-bishop appointed by the duke of Savoy. Savoy, part of the Holy Roman Empire, was located in the Alps, south of the city. The Genevans had long wanted their independence.

  In 1526, the Genevan bishop, Pierre de la Baume, corrupt, inept, and inconsistent in policy (there is nothing worse for business than inconsistency in policy), failed to quell an uprising by the local patriotic party, known as the “Eidguenots.” The Eidguenots (from which we get the later “Huguenots”), sensing weakness, approached the neighboring Swiss cantons of Bern and Fribourg and formed a triple alliance aimed at kicking out Pierre, and with him the duke of Savoy. The bishop fled, but the duke sent troops and Pierre was reinstalled in 1533 with the help of Catholic Fribourg, which double-crossed Geneva and remained loyal to Rome.

  Pierre hadn't been back in power six months before he was forced to escape again. However, this time when Catholic Savoy, aided by Charles, sent an army, Protestant Bern, aided by Francis, sent an opposing one. By May 1536, it was all over—the Genevans had their city to themselves.

  The Genevan clergy, who by and large had supported the bishop, were now held in extreme disfavor by the Eidguenots, who threw their support instead behind Guillaume Farel, an expatriate French preacher and former member of the Cercle de Meaux. Farel had been in the city since 1532. He immediately called for the end of Mass and the destruction of relics and idols. Those Catholic clergymen remaining in town were given the choice of exile or conversion. Most left and Geneva became officially Protestant.

  Three months later, Calvin rode into town on his way to Strasbourg, intending to stay only the one night. He stayed, more or less, for the rest of his life.

  “WHEN FAREL, “WHO HAD READ the Institutes, was told that its author was in town, he rushed over to meet him. Farel needed help. Although the Genevan citizenry had voted to “live by the Gospel,” they were having trouble with the particulars. There was no real discipline within their church, and Farel needed to organize the new theories into a coherent whole. Who better to aid an aging, overburdened preacher than a gifted young man of energy and spirit who had already set the philosophy down on paper so expertly?

  But Calvin was not seeking a position in Geneva. He was working on a new, updated Institutes. The first edition had almost sold out, and there was even talk of a French version. Calvin needed time to write and study, and he preferred the more sophisticated Strasbourg. He declined the invitation, claiming that he was too shy, his temperament was unsuitable… he just wasn't the right choice.

  But Farel hadn't fought the bishop, fought Fribourg, fought the local clergy, and even fought Bern only to be stopped by one man's self-deprecation. He had been spit upon, beaten up, and put in fear of his life, all to get Geneva to this moment. When blandishments failed, Farel used theatrics. He stood up, glared down at Calvin, raised his arm, pointed a finger at him, and brought down God's curse like Zeus on the mountaintop. Years later, Calvin could still recall the incident:

  Wherever else I had gone, I had taken care to conceal that I was the author of [The Institutes]; and I had resolved to continue in the same privacy and obscurity, until at length Guil-laume Farel detained me at Geneva, not so much by counsel and exhortation, as by a dreadful curse, which I felt to be as if God had from heaven laid his mighty hand upon me to arrest me… Farel, who burned with an extraordinary zeal to advance the gospel, immediately strained every nerve to detain me. And after learning that my heart was set upon devoting myself to private studies, for which I wished to keep myself free from other pursuits, and finding that he gained nothing by entreaties, he proceeded to utter the imprecation that God would curse my retirement and the tranquility of the studies which I sought, if I should withdraw and refuse to help, when the necessity was so urgent. By this imprecation I was so terror-struck, that I gave up the journey I had undertaken.

  So John Calvin stayed to preach in Geneva.

  FAREL MADE CALVIN PASTOR at one of the city churches. In addition to weekly sermons, he was responsible for all the mundane aspects of church life—weddings, baptisms, funerals, and the organization of church functions. But that was not why Farel had asked him to come, nor why he had stayed. They both had bigger plans, and on January 16, 1537, they brought them forward in a document entitled “Articles concerning the Organization of the Church and of Worship at Geneva.”

  The Articles provided a blueprint for standardizing church services and membership throughout the city. Among their proposals was a call for communion to be celebrated once a month, for psalms to be sung at services, and for the establishment of a children's choir. But it also contained some less benign demands. Farel and Calvin required that the civil authorities give over the right of excommunication completely to the church. They also called for the appointment of certain qualified persons to spy on the rest of the community, this to ensure that everyone was behaving in an upright, austere fashion at all times. Only then could they be eligible for communion and therefore admission to the church. Most controversial of all was the requirement that every living soul in the city of Geneva take a solemn pledge that ran to twenty-one paragraphs, affirming their faith in Calvin's interpretation of the Scriptures as it applied to everything from God and law to prayer, salvation, and behavior. Refusal to take the oath was to be punishable by loss of citizenship and banishment.

  The plan was submitted to the civil government, which then consisted of three layers. At the top were four syndics and a city treasurer, elected by the male citizens of Geneva. The syndics also sat on the twenty-five-member Petit Conseil (Little Council), which met three times a week to administer the affairs of the city, deal with foreign issues and capital crimes, and handle finances. Then there was the Deux Cents, the Council of Two Hundred, which met once a month to discuss legislation and was legally the ultimate authority, but for all intents and purposes was ruled by the Little Council. So it was to the Little Council that Calvin and Farel brought their articles. The council was unwilling to risk disrupting the fragile faith of the newly converted city, so it approved the plan and the Council of Two Hundred followed suit.

  But it is one thing to adopt legislation, another to enforce it. There were already any number of laws on the books to which nobody paid the least bit of attention, and many on the Council of Two Hundred expected that Calvin's articles would suffer the same fate. But they had not reckoned with the commitment of their new ministers. For over a year, Calvin and Farel pushed for administration of the pledge. In July 1537, they ordered the police to roust the populace in groups to force the oath on them. Nonetheless, many continued to refuse.

  Over the next six months, opposition to Calvin's policies grew. Finally, in January 1538, the Council of Two Hundred decreed that, pledge or no pledge, no one could be excluded from taking communion. Then, in February, when the general election was held, the citizens of Geneva voted in new syndics, and a Little Council vehemently opposed to the ministers.

  The situation worsened. Calvin and Farel were harassed. Obscene ditties were sung outside Calvin's house and gunshots fired under his windows. Matters came to a head on Easter Sunday. Calvin and Farel refused to administer communion on the grounds that the congregation was contaminated because not everyone had taken the pledge. There were riots in the streets.

  That was enough. Genevans hadn't fought ten years to be rid of Savoy so it could be replaced by this. On April 23, 1538, the Council of Two Hundred gave Calvin and Farel three days to get out of town. C
alvin's response to his banishment: “Well and good. If we had served men we would have been ill-requited, but we serve a Good Master who will reward us.”

  There was public rejoicing in the streets of Geneva as Calvin and Farel rode away.

  THEY “WENT TO BERN TO report their injuries at the hands of the councils, and from there to Zurich and a general meeting of Swiss reformers. The ministers at Zurich listened to Calvin's version of events and agreed with his interpretations. They instructed Bern to send an embassy to Geneva and use its influence to see if matters couldn't be smoothed over. Bern intervened as requested, but to no avail. Geneva was adamant. No more Calvin. He was turned back before he reached the city's walls.

  He and Farel, now unemployed and homeless, went to Basel to stay with friends. Soon after, Farel accepted a position as pastor at Neuchâ-tel, where he had preached before coming to Geneva, and he urged Calvin to come with him. But Calvin, tired and humiliated, preferred to retreat into his books.

  Then Bucer and Capito, still in Strasbourg, urged Calvin to fulfill his original intention of accepting a pastorship in their town. Calvin paid a visit in July, but loath to subject himself to the pressures and conditions that he had so recently experienced in Geneva, he refused Bucer's offer. The older reformer then took a page out of Farel's book. “God will know how to find the rebellious servant, as he found Jonah,” he thundered.

  September found Calvin in Strasbourg, pastor of a congregation composed primarily of French refugees.

  LIFE IN STRASBOURG “WAS MUCH more to Calvin's taste. There were none of those ugly scenes and difficulties that had characterized his relations in Geneva. Strasbourg had gone over to the reformers early, in 1524, and already had a solid church organization in place by the time Calvin got there. There was therefore no need to struggle with the government for the enactment of religious rules (although there was no pledge, and the civil authorities retained the right to excommunicate). Nor was Calvin looked to as the sole, or even the primary, reformer— that role was Bucer's. Calvin's parish was small, just a couple hundred displaced countrymen. Ecclesiola gallicana, he called it—the little French church. It was small enough that he knew everyone, and he didn't have any trouble with discipline; the congregation didn't seem to mind that he quizzed them on faith before administering communion at Easter, and they wholeheartedly embraced his passion for song at worship. In fact, the little French church became known for its choir.