Out of the Flames Read online

  Despite the council's edict, designated as the Nicene Creed, it remained difficult for the Church, even on pain of heresy, to convince the faithful to embrace the new doctrine, which many found incomprehensible. Saint Jerome's inclusion of the Trinitarian passage in i John of the Vulgate Bible did not wipe away the doubts. The Trinity continued to be a hard theological sell until, in his great work De trinitatis (On the Trinity), Saint Augustine provided an effective logical underpinning to the concept by lucid analogies to human experience, using such tripartite combinations as memory, understanding, and will. From there, the Trinity became accepted as the absolute cornerstone of the Christian experience. Antitrinitarian movements continued to spring up periodically over the centuries, but each was brutally suppressed, its proponents usually tortured and then executed as heretics.

  Servetus, whose biblical scholarship even at nineteen was colossal, knew that nothing of the Nicene Creed was stated or even hinted at in the Scriptures, which he had read in the original Hebrew and Greek. While studying the Bible at Toulouse he had found “not one word about the Trinity, nor about its Persons, nor about Essence, nor about a unity of the Substance.” The Trinity was a contrivance—sheer mysticism—and Christianity could never be purified until it was stripped away. Servetus, from his study of the Old Testament and the Koran, was convinced that the old competing Arian belief that Christ was a man who became divine as a result of God's word was, in fact, the correct interpretation.

  As a result, Servetus argued at Oecolampadius's dinner table, God was in all of us, and man did not need a mediator. “I say, therefore,” he was to write only one year later, “that God himself is our spirit dwelling in us and this is the Holy Spirit within us. In this we testify that there is in our spirit a certain working latent energy, a certain heavenly sense, a latent divinity and it bloweth where it listeth and I hear its voice and I know not whence it comes nor whither it goes. So is everyone that is born of the spirit of God.”

  Servetus insisted to Oecolampadius that he personally could disprove the notion of the Trinity and therefore undermine the entire rotten structure on which stood the power of Rome.

  “WHAT SERVETUS HAD NOT taken into account was that it does not take very long for revolutions to turn reactionary. In fact, it is usually one of the first byproducts of success, when the erstwhile revolutionaries discover, often to their surprise, that they themselves now have some substantial stake in a new status quo. Now that he had established himself in power, Oecolampadius was no longer all that interested in undermining Rome. He was far more interested in consolidating Basel. Also, like many of the other reformers, including Luther, Oecolampadius was not optimistic about the nature of man. He feared a religion with no Son of God as an intermediary.

  Still, a convert of Michael Servetus's energy and intellect was not to be let go lightly, so Oecolampadius let him stay at his house for ten months, trying to sway him from his dangerous and radical views. Servetus would not budge, however, and relations between the two became increasingly tense. After a while, they ceased speaking altogether, and Oecolampadius took to writing letters to Servetus even though they were living in the same house. “To Servetus the Spaniard who denies that Christ is the consubstantial Son of God from Johannes Oecolampadius,” he addressed one. In another, he wrote, “By denying that the Son is eternal you deny of necessity also that the Father is eternal,” a statement that betrays a far lesser grasp of logic and the nuances of the Scriptures than was possessed by his barely postadolescent guest.

  Finally, when it became clear that his arguments were futile, Oecolampadius turned on Servetus altogether. At a summit meeting of Swiss reform leaders, he made a point of telling everyone that there was a Spaniard named Servetus living under his roof who was spouting abominations.

  Soon afterward, Servetus found out that he was about to be denounced. Since a man in Basel had just been executed for a much less significant deviation from the new reforms, it was clear, even to someone with Servetus's massive social naiveté, that it was time to leave. He fled the city in May of 1531 and headed for Strasbourg, where the reform leaders Martin Bucer and Wolfgang Capito were much more tolerant and liked him personally.

  In Strasbourg, where he felt safer, Servetus realized that he didn't need the approval of Oecolampadius or anyone else to make his ideas heard. It was now possible to fight the Church, any Church, orthodox or reformed. With the new technology, he could take his case directly to the people.

  Michael Servetus began to look around for a printer.

  THROUGH A SUPPORTER, he was put in touch with Johann Setzer, who agreed to publish his book. This was a big coup for a new young author. Setzer had almost as prestigious a name as Froben and was even more prolific. In nine years, he had issued about 150 titles. Setzer was based in Haganau, about fifteen miles from Strasbourg, in Alsace. Servetus moved there to help supervise the printing.

  He decided to call his work De Trinitatis Erroribus (On the Errors of the Trinity), a direct slap at Saint Augustine. The book itself was 120 pages, octavo, of course—mini-octavo, actually, called a duodecimo, with pages only 3 inches by 6 inches, making it that much easier to stash away on short notice. It was divided into seven sections, each headed by an “argument” (a thesis Servetus intended to demonstrate), followed by a synopsis of the points that constituted his proof, then a series of numbered paragraphs elaborating on each point.

  As even Servetus later acknowledged, the writing itself was often crude and rushed, betraying both the author's youth and his sense of urgency about getting it to press. Still even his fiercest detractors acknowledged that Errors of the Trinity was a prodigious piece of scholarship. Servetus cited over thirty sources in Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and Arabic and quoted or alluded to fifty-two of the sixty-six books of the Bible, and six books of the Apocrypha.

  Beyond that, however, the only other thing many of them acknowledged was their fury. It was not simply that this teenager was attacking what was now just about the holiest concept in Christianity, Catholic or reformed, but that he had done so in language that in the most generous terms would be described as immoderate. Through much of the book, particularly in the early stages, Servetus wrote as if addressing an unnamed opponent—it is not difficult to imagine who that might have been—and he often treated the opponent's positions with outright ridicule. About viewing the Holy Spirit as “a separate being,” Servetus wrote that it was “practical tritheism, no better than atheism.” He added that the doctrine of the Trinity itself was “inconceivable, worst of all [it] incurs the ridicule of the Mohammedans and the Jews.” Finally, he observed, “I know not what madness it is in men that does not see that in the Scriptures every sort of unity of God is always referred to as the Father.”

  While it is possible that this was a conscious attempt to be inflammatory, it is more likely, judging from the rest of the work, that Servetus simply had become so frustrated with what he perceived to be the unwillingness of those around him to see the obvious that he was unable to stop himself from shaking them by the lapels. Servetus was so smart that it never seemed to occur to him that his arguments would be more effective if he didn't imply that anyone holding an opposing view was an idiot.

  Language aside, the book was hardly heretical in intent. A preeminent Unitarian scholar, Earl Morse Wilbur, wrote that Errors “is suffused with passionate earnestness, warm piety, an ardent reverence for Scripture, and a love for Christ so mystical and overpowering that [he] can hardly find words to express it.” Nor, surprisingly, does the work attempt to throw out the concept of the Trinity entirely but only the manner in which it had been imposed on Christianity. Servetus asserted that the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit were dispositions of God, not separate and distinct beings. That latter definition, he said, was purely an invention—even Saint Augustine admitted that the concept was merely implicit in the Scriptures and could be discovered only through revelation. It was the philosophical contrivances used to prove the Trinity that were the cor
nerstone of Church corruption.

  His own point of view can be summed up in his introduction to Book VII:

  The incomprehensible God is known through Christ, by Faith, rather than by philosophical speculations. He manifests God to us, being the expression of His very being; and through Him alone God can be known. The Scriptures reveal Him to those who have Faith; and thus we come to know the Holy Spirit as the Divine impulse within us.

  “WHEN SETZER SAW SERVETUS'S manuscript, he knew he had a problem. Just the title alone could get him burned. He still wanted to publish it—heretical books sold extremely well—but he did not want to be identified with it, just in case this one was a little too heretical. Any risk, Setzer felt, should be borne by the author alone, so he put out the book without a publisher's imprint.

  On the Errors of the Trinity justified Setzer's faith in the commercial potential of heresy. The entire first printing, probably around one thousand copies, sold out almost immediately, and soon both book and author were being discussed everywhere. More than a few found his arguments cogent and persuasive, among them a number of senior reform theologians. Capito wrote to Oecolampadius that “the book became remarkably popular.” Sebastian Franck, a liberal Catholic priest, wrote from Strasbourg to a friend, “The Spaniard, Servetus, contends in his tract that there is but one person in God. The Roman Church holds that there are three persons in one essence. I agree rather with the Spaniard.”

  In fact, the Trinity had already been causing problems for the reformers, independent of anything Servetus had written. Luther left it out of his catechisms, and others had tried to avoid the subject entirely. Nonetheless, they were hesitant about eliminating the Trinitarian doctrine entirely and casting such an obvious insult at the Catholic Church. Servetus, it has been argued, by the directness of his attack, brought the issue prematurely into the open and forced the reform movement to decide whether it would support the Trinity or not. Without Servetus's book, the Protestant churches might well have later rejected the Nicene Creed and adopted Servetus's view of the Trinity as three dispositions of God.

  As it was, however, they jumped the other way. In 1533, Me-lanchthon wrote that he was “always afraid disputes about the Trinity would break out some time or other.” He added, “Good God! What tragedies will this question… raise among posterity?”

  Not yet understanding the degree of animosity he had evoked, but seeing only how his book was on everyone's lips, Servetus, like any new author buoyed by success, began sending out review copies. He tried to get quotes from Erasmus and Luther. He even sent copies to Catholic bishops in Spain, especially to Zaragossa, in his home province.

  But much as Salman Rushdie was to discover four and a half centuries later, underestimating the zeal of one's religious opponents can be dangerous. Not only was Servetus's book instantly banned, but he himself was sentenced to death in absentia by the Inquisition in Spain.

  But in absentia wasn't nearly enough for the inquisitors. They wanted him back, they wanted him dead, and they were willing to do almost anything to make it happen. They sent out spies to Servetus's hometown. They interrogated his friends and family. They intercepted his mail and read his letters.

  The inquisitors in Spain soon discovered that they were not the only ones after him. Reform leaders were now equally furious. Oeco-lampadius took the lead in denouncing his former houseguest and used all his influence to stem the growing support for Servetus's ideas. He put pressure on Bucer and Capito, the reform leaders of Strasbourg, to denounce him as well hoping to deny Servetus any safe haven. In a letter to Bucer, Oecolampadius wrote, “Our friends at Berne… are very much offended with the book… I desire you would acquaint Luther, that this book was printed out of this country, and without our knowledge… but that [Servetus] thinks he knows more than everybody else. Our church will be very ill spoken of, unless our divines make it their business to cry him down… we know not how that beast came to creep among us.” Bucer, Servetus's erstwhile champion in Strasbourg, who had previously referred to him as “Michael dilecte” (delicious), now declared in a public sermon that “Servetus deserved to be cut in pieces, and to have his bowels torn out of him.”

  Still, the book's support did not flag, and its influence even began to spread. Indeed, it was the very acclaim that Servetus's book received in important centers of learning like Venice that caused such consternation among the Protestant leadership. So pronounced was Servetus's impact on Italian humanism that no less a figure than Melanchthon, as late as 1539, personally wrote a letter to the extremely Catholic senate of Venice beseeching the senators to “use their utmost endeavors, that the impious errors of that man might be avoided, rejected, and abhorred.”

  Back in Spain, the inquisitors learned that Servetus was shuttling back and forth between Switzerland and Germany, trying to soften Oecolampadius's opposition through direct appeal. Servetus had even published a second, less strident book, again with Setzer, called Dialo-gorum De Trinitate Libri Duo (Two Dialogues on the Trinity) to placate his Swiss critics. But by that time it didn't matter. Both On the Errors of the Trinity and Dialogues were banned in most of Switzerland, including Basel, and in Strasbourg.

  With the competition intensifying to grab him first, the inquisitors in Spain, hoping to coax Servetus back, went to great lengths to hide the fact that they had already condemned him. By law they were required to post the order of his condemnation on the door of the cathedral of Zaragossa on a holy day. Instead, these instructions were issued:

  We deem it expedient to try every possible means to lure the said “Miguel Reves” [Servetus] back to Spain, enticing him by promises of favors or other offers, and if this fail then exert pressure. A few suggestions to that end are appended… For this purpose it is not wise to publish the edict so ceremoniously as we said. Rather it should be read with dissimulation so that no one may suppose or understand that the said Reves is summoned by the Inquisition, for that would be to notify his relatives and friends and they would alert him to accept no offer that might be made. And never mind about affixing the edict to the church doors, or if you do, let it be done at an hour when no one can read, and take it down at once before any one has read it.

  Then they sent his youngest brother Juan, the priest, to Germany to transmit to Servetus an offer of protection from the Protestants, as well as a high position and honors and the wish of his family to see him again. As Juan went to seek out his brother, the reformers in Switzerland stepped up their efforts to arrest him.

  But both sides were too late. Michael Servetus had disappeared.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  WHILE SERVETUS'S BROTHER and the reformers searched throughout Switzerland and Germany, a dark, highly educated twenty-two-year-old named Michel de Villeneuve en-rolled at the University of Paris to study mathematics.

  Even back in 1533, Paris was Paris: chic, sophisticated, the envy of its less fashionable neighbors. With a population of 300,000, it was the largest city in Europe after Constantinople. While it was true that the streets were impossibly narrow and the low-storied houses so jammed together that the stench of refuse, both human and otherwise, wafted in the gentle breeze, what sixteenth-century city did not have its share of inconveniences? Paris also had the most skilled goldsmiths, the most opulent jewelers, the best food, the most cultured manners, and the most elegantly adorned women in the civilized world.

  Dominating the intellectual life of the city was the University of Paris, the single most powerful and influential institution of learning in Europe. There were the usual four faculties, of which, also as usual, theology, known as the Sorbonne, was preeminent. For admission to the doctoral program in theology, a student had first to complete a prerequisite five-year arts course. Of the top graduates, only those considered sufficiently industrious to endure the rigors of an additional fifteen-year course of study were allowed the opportunity to earn a degree. A doctorate in theology from the University of Paris entitled the bearer to join the faculty, teach at the college,
and help make religious policy—and therefore political policy—not only for France, but for the rest of Catholic Europe.

  To head theology during this time of turmoil the faculty chose Noël Béda, a hard, cold, narrow-minded, suspicious man who embodied the spirit of orthodoxy. He held the position of syndic to the faculty and was responsible for setting the agenda for meetings and seeing that decisions were enforced. It was originally conceived as an annual post, but Béda was first appointed in 1520 and held the position for thirteen pivotal years. A teacher as well, he beat Latin syllogisms into his students and by the force of his own will tried single-handedly to hold back the encroachment of humanists and reformers alike.

  Béda was one of the few among his peers to recognize the power of books—and thus the necessity of suppressing them. In 1521, he had convinced Francis and the Parlement of Paris to make it a criminal offense to print or sell any book that dealt with or touched on religion— which meant just about every conceivable book—without prior permission of the faculty. When that proved insufficient, he put out a second proclamation two months later requiring anyone who owned a work by or about Luther to turn it over to the Parlement within a week or face a hefty fine and jail sentence.

  But then as now, there was nothing like a little controversy to improve the commercial prospects of an author's work. Béda's attempt at suppression only served to bring Luther to the attention of the public, thereby making him even more popular than before. And when Luther's disciple, Melanchthon, weighed in with Loci Communes, the University of Paris's arts faculty made it a point to tweak the Sorbonne and openly pass copies of the book around to staff and students.