Out of the Flames Read online

  Suleiman's disapproval doomed Békés, and Báthori was elected. When Békés returned and stirred up a rebellion, his troops were routed and he was forced into exile.

  Báthori, who was not especially devout and claimed to favor a continuation of the policies of his predecessor, seemed an enlightened choice. Biandrata approved. He even used his considerable clout to have Báthori also elected king of Poland after Sigismund II died (also without issue) in 1575. On ascending the Polish throne, Báthori willingly submitted to an oath allowing members of all religions to worship in peace.

  But, in fact, the Unitarian Camelot was finished. The new king soon decreed that Unitarians would be allowed to practice their faith, but only on the condition that they did not further extend their questioning of traditional dogma. This proved to be a more incendiary condition than first assumed. So tenuous had the Unitarian position become that when Francis David, a prominent Unitarian, asserted that the Lord's Supper was merely symbolic, Biandrata had him arrested before the king could act to suppress the movement entirely. When David was brought to trial, Biandrata himself served as prosecutor. David died in jail shortly thereafter, and Biandrata became an object of loathing within the movement he had done so much to create.

  It didn't help Biandrata's reputation that his appeasement strategy failed totally. In 1579, Báthori, in an effort to encourage Catholicism within his borders, asked the Jesuits to send missionaries to work among the peasantry. The Jesuits came but mostly went to work on Báthori. The oath of toleration that he had taken at his coronation was void, they insisted. Not only was a king not bound by promises given to heretics, he was under holy obligation to break them. They finally convinced Báthori of God's will, and Unitarians lost whatever fragile legal standing they had retained.

  Jesuits and Calvinists didn't agree on many things, but one thing they did agree on was that liberal Christianity was anathema. Heresy aside, a movement that placed moral responsibility with the individual was an overwhelming threat to centralized power. Thus, even in those areas where control was contested, Unitarians were persecuted.

  As for Biandrata, he died, unmourned, in 1588.

  “WHEN COUNT DANIEL Márkos Szent-Iványi recognized the copy of Christianismi Restitutio in a London bookshop almost one hundred years later, the Unitarians' position was, if anything, more precarious than before. In fact, it was that very precariousness that had forced Count Szent-Iványi to be in London in the first place.

  In 1638, the Unitarian university at Racow, Poland, a place of learning of sufficient reputation that parents of Catholics and Protestants across Europe sent their sons there for a quality education, had been closed. Then, in 1660, Unitarianism in Poland was officially suppressed. Unitarians were forced to flee to Protestant strongholds throughout Europe, including the Netherlands, Germany, and especially England. That diaspora, more than any other single event, is responsible for the strong and vibrant Unitarian presence in present-day Western Europe and the United States.

  In Transylvania, pressure on dissenters steadily increased. Leaders of the Unitarian movement were often imprisoned or executed, and the property of adherents seized. Congregations held on, often by force of belief alone.

  When Count Szent-Iványi returned home to Transylvania several years later, he took his copy of Christianismi Restitutio with him. It was irrelevant to him that he now possessed the only known copy of an important historic work, something he could have sold to a collector for a hefty sum. Instead, he donated the book to his church, the Unitarian congregation at Cluj, Transylvania's capital. The minister, thrilled to receive so rare a gift, took it and put it away so that it would remain safe. Of course, neither man recognized the importance of, or even especially noted, the critical passage on blood circulation.

  Servetus and his discovery were once again lost to the world.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  TWO DECADES LATER, in 1689, the Catholic king of England, James II, was deposed, more or less bloodlessly, by the Protestant nobility in what has come to be known as the Glorious Revolution. They replaced James with Holland's William of Orange, who was married to James's Protestant daughter Mary. Parliament then set about enacting a series of laws to curb the monarchy's power and prevent a return to Catholicism.

  The great religious question settled, scientific discovery became the major force in English intellectual life. Newton had published the first edition of Principia Mathematica three years earlier, Robert Boyle had conducted sophisticated experiments in chemistry, and his assistant, Robert Hooke, had proposed a wave theory of light. Suddenly there was talk of gravity, light spectra, calculus, and the microscope. The staggering pace of these new developments was disorienting for many in the academic community. A backlash set in among a group of traditionalists, who were quickly dubbed “The Ancients” by wits of the day, while those who aggressively championed the new theories—many of them members of the Royal Society—were called “The Moderns.”

  This conflict came to a head with the publication by Sir William Temple of an essay entitled “Upon the Ancient and Modern Learning.” Sir William was a gentleman of considerable stature in seventeenth-century England. He had enjoyed a long diplomatic career, mostly in Belgium and the Netherlands, which culminated in his appointment as ambassador to The Hague. He had become acquainted with William of Orange while the future king of England was still a boy, and had even taken a hand in arranging his marriage to Mary. Although technically in retirement during King William's reign, he remained an advisor, and several times the king traveled to one of Sir William's various country houses to consult with him.

  Sir William, in addition to his estates, maintained a chic town house in London, and an art collection that included masterpieces by Van Dyck, Titian, and Holbein. This combination of money, power, and influence had caused Sir William to develop a rather high opinion of himself and his abilities, which worked to the detriment of self-discipline. He had a habit, for example, of bragging of his sexual prowess, regardless of the audience—in his youth it “had nearly killed him,” he often observed. On his death, he left instructions that his heart be cut out and buried in a silver box in one of his gardens, and the rest of him interred at Westminster Abbey.

  In 1690, Sir William decided to throw his considerable reputation into the Ancient-Modern debate, and it did not daunt him in the least that he had no scientific training or knowledge with which to support his arguments. He was already a familiar figure in literary circles, having published a number of popular memoirs about his experiences in the Netherlands, so producing a scholarly essay tracking the course of knowledge from the Greeks up until the present day seemed a nice way to keep himself in the public eye. He weighed in with full force on the side of the Ancients.

  Sir William began with the unequivocal assertion that books had little impact either in perpetuating or advancing human knowledge. After all, he noted, ancient societies like that in Mexico did not have books, and they did just fine. He went on to chart all of the various branches of learning—philosophy, grammar, rhetoric, poetry, astronomy, physic (medicine), music, architecture, and mathematics—and found that in each case the Greeks were clearly superior in both style and content.

  More than this, Sir William brought into serious question the significance of the Moderns' discoveries and even their authenticity:

  There is nothing new in Astronomy, to vie with the ancients, unless it be the Copernican system; nor in Physic, unless Harvey's circulation of the blood. But whether either of these be modern discoveries, or derived from the old fountains, is disputed… if they are true, yet these two great discoveries have made no change in the conclusions of Astronomy, nor in the practice of Physic, and so have been of little use to the world, though perhaps of much honour to the authors.

  Indeed, according to Sir William, the Moderns' insistence on thinking for themselves was positively harmful. “Besides who can tell whether learning may not even weaken invention, in a man that has great advantages fro
m nature and birth; whether the weight and number of so many other men's thoughts and notions may not suppress his own… as heaping on wood, or too many sticks, or too close together, suppresses, and sometimes extinguishes, a little spark that would otherwise have grown up to a noble flame.”

  Those in the academic world allied on the side of the Ancients were thrilled that so eminent an authority as Sir William Temple should take up their cause. They even reissued the works of those early philosophers about whom Sir William had been especially enthusiastic, among them the epistles of a sixth-century B.C. Sicilian monarch named Phalaris, whom Sir William had praised for his “spirit, wit, and genius,” to say nothing of his benevolence.

  Unfortunately for Sir William, scholars had proved sometime earlier that the letters about which he had been so effusive were fakes. More than that, Phalaris was actually a ruthless tyrant who had his enemies roasted alive inside a huge bronze bull. When he was finally overthrown by Telemachus, the bronze bull was then used to cook Phalaris. The Moderns seized on the Phalaris blunder with glee, then brought forth a twenty-eight-year-old English country clergyman named William Wotton to take on Sir William.

  Wotton, at the time chaplain to the earl of Nottingham, had been a child prodigy, described in a letter to Pepys as “one of the miracles of this age for his early and vast comprehension.” Unlike Sir William, Wotton was a thorough scholar and meticulous researcher.

  In 1694, Wotton, choosing his title as a direct parody of Sir William's, published Reflections upon Ancient and Modern Learning. He examined the same branches of learning, delineating the same inventions or discoveries, eviscerating Sir William's arguments line by line.

  Reflections upon Ancient and Modern Learning catapulted Wotton into the frontlines of the battle, and the counterattacks were quick in coming. Sir William wrote a second essay in reply, and angry epithets by the supporters of each flew back and forth in print. Sir William's most powerful ally was his former secretary, none other than Jonathan Swift. Swift, who should have known better, hurled himself into the breach, immortalizing the sniping in an essay entitled The Battle of the Books. It began:

  The

  BOOKSELLER

  To The

  READER

  The following Discourse… seems to have been written… when the famous dispute was on foot about Ancient and Modern learning. The controversy took its rise from an essay of Sir William Temple's upon that subject, which was answered by W Wotton, B.D…. In this dispute, the town highly resented to see a person of Sir William Temple's character and methods roughly used by the reverend gentlemen aforesaid, and without any manner of provocation. At length, there appearing no end of the quarrel, our author tells us, that the Books in Saint James's Library, looking upon themselves as parties principally concerned, took up the controversy and came to a decisive battle.

  The books then slip from the shelves, don armor, take up lances and swords, and ride horses about the library in combat. In the ensuing fight, the Ancients give the Moderns a proper thrashing.

  The Battle of the Books, although hilarious and written with Swift's trademark acid quill, did not advance his standing among his peers. “Wit,” Samuel Johnson observed of the essay, “can stand its ground against truth only a little while.”

  LOST AMIDST ALL THE FUROR was a short paragraph in Wotton's book. In Chapter 18, “Of the Circulation of the Blood,” he wrote:

  The first that I could ever find who had a distinct Idea of this Matter was Michael Servetus, a Spanish physician, who was burnt for Arianism at Geneva near 140 years ago. Well had it been for the Church of Christ if he had wholly confined himself to his own Profession!… in a Book of his, entitled Chris-tianismi Restitutio, printed in the year MDLIII, he clearly asserts that the Blood passes through Lungs, from the Left to the Right Ventricle of the Heart; and not through the Partition which divides the two Ventricles, as was at the Time commonly believed. How he introduces it, or in which of the Six Discourses in which Servetus divides his book, it is to be found, I know not, having never seen the Book myself. Mr. Charles Bernard, a very learned and eminent Chirurgeon [surgeon] of London, who did me the Favour to communicate this Passage to me, which was transcribed out of Servetus, could inform me not further, only that he had it from a learned Friend of his, who had himself copied it from Servetus.

  This was the first time that Servetus's great discovery had been mentioned in print. Although it evoked a certain curiosity, the passage was more or less ignored. There were not too many in England, Ancient or Modern, willing to withdraw even partial credit for the discovery of pulmonary circulation from Harvey and grant it to a Spanish heretic. What's more, Wotton, by his own admission not having seen the actual book, had made mistakes. There were seven discourses, not six, and Servetus had (correctly) written that blood traveled from the right ventricle to the left, not the other way around as Wotton quoted.

  But Wotton persisted. He went back to Dr. Bernard to locate the actual copy of the book. Bernard, perhaps the most prominent surgeon in England, who had once had the sheriff of London removed from his post for failing to deliver cadavers of criminals for dissection purposes, directed Wotton to the source of the quote.

  Three years later, Wotton produced a second edition of Reflections upon Ancient and Modern Learning, in which he updated the Servetus section and noted that he had now seen a transcription of Christianismi Restitutio in the library of the bishop of Norwich. The bishop had told Wotton that his transcription had been made from an original. The original had come from the personal library of a German noble, Landgrave (provincial governor) Karl von Hessen-Kassel.

  HESSE, IN “WESTERN GERMANY, just north of Mainz, had been a Protestant stronghold almost from the time of Luther, but no one knew how this copy of Christianismi Restitutio came to be in the landgrave's library, including, apparently, the landgrave himself. Nor was this the same copy that Szent-Iványi had purchased in London. That copy had been clean and unmarked. A number of pages in the copy on the landgrave's shelves were damaged, browned in the center as if by scorching, and in one or two cases, burned through. What was most significant about this copy, however, was that at the end, on the three blank pages after the colophon, were handwritten notes. On the first of those three pages, the person who had written those notes had signed his name.

  It was Germain Colladon. This was the very copy that Colladon had used at the trial. The notes were references to the text that Colladon, Calvin's friend and surrogate prosecutor of Michael Servetus, had used to organize his prosecution.

  It was not unusual for works used as evidence in heresy trials to be stored as evidence, even after the sentence on the accused had been carried out, so Colladon's retention of the book might not have violated Calvin's direct order to have all copies destroyed.

  Sometimes, however, the evidence was destroyed with the heretic, and the scorching on the pages led to speculation that perhaps the Col-ladon copy was the very one chained to Servetus at his execution, and that someone had snatched it out of the flames. The idea that someone had reached into a burning pile of twigs and leaves at a public execution to grab away a forbidden book before it could be consumed and then successfully made his escape through a phalanx of soldiers seemed more than a little improbable. Moreover, the scorching appeared on very few of the almost eight hundred pages, and then only in the center of the page, never on the edges, as would have been the case if the book had actually been placed on or near the flames. A much more likely explanation is that someone, possibly Colladon himself, fell asleep while examining the book, and candle wax inadver-tently dripped on an open page. Later theories asserted that the stains had been caused by water, not fire. While there is evidence that the book was exposed to moisture—in the second half there had been a discernible crinkling of the pages—the damage to the browned pages seems certainly to have been caused by heat.

  Colladon's copy, then, had either been sold with his effects upon his death or stolen, the perpetrator likely someone of th
e prosecutor's acquaintance who had access to his private papers. Whether acquired legally or illegally, for motives ideological or mercenary, the book had eventually made its way through the serpentine alleys of the European book trade to end up, as had many priceless volumes, as an anonymous occupant in the library of a nobleman who knew nothing of either the book's significance or its value. Clearly, however, someone with access to the library had known of both and had made copies of the text without bothering to mention it to the landgrave. One of these copies had ended up in the library of the bishop of Norwich.

  Then, in 1706, a friend of Hessen-Kassel noticed the book while browsing through his library. Unlike the landgrave, this man was well aware of the death of Servetus and recognized immediately that he had stumbled upon something of great rarity and value. The friend was the great German philosopher and mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz.

  LEIBNIZ, BY NOW SIXTY, was one of history's few true universal geniuses. By the time he was twelve, he had taught himself Latin and Greek so that he could read the books in his father's library. As an adult, he began the development of symbolic logic and, working independently of Newton, invented calculus. In physics, Leibniz anticipated Einstein by rejecting Newtonian absolutes and arguing that space, time, and motion are relative. He propounded a theory of substance based on a construct called “monads,” which he claimed exerted force on one another. He invented a calculating machine capable of performing all four arithmetic operations. He studied Roman law and natural law and applied each to the modern day. He studied Chinese thought and interpreted it for the European mind. In metaphysics, he proposed the “law of optimism,” in which he claimed that man lived in the “best of all possible worlds” (a claim Voltaire would later lampoon in Candide). As a corollary, he strongly disagreed with Locke's notion that the mind is tabula rasa at birth, to be developed only as experience plays on the senses.