Michael Servetus: Unitarian Martyr

Rev. Paul Sprecher

Second Parish in Hingham, www.secondparish.org

February 5, 2012

Reading: from Out of the Flames -Lawrence & Nancy Goldstone, pp. 321-322

The growth of human knowledge has always depended on individuals of immense talent and passion who have struggled to evoke fundamental change in the way we see our world. Those who succeeded, like Einstein, Newton, Shakespeare, or Picasso, have become our most respected figures. We often forget, however, that in many cases those changes we now so unconditionally embrace were resisted fiercely by the reigning orthodoxies of their times, and that many of those whom we now consider visionaries were ridiculed and reviled until the force of their vision overwhelmed the concentrated ignorance around them.

But there were also those, no less brilliant, who did not succeed, whose ideas could not take root before they were crushed. Their vision and passion were no less intense, and what they had to say no less vital to the human spirit. It was only circumstance that separated them from the others.

Michael Servetus was one of those great, overlooked figures. With kinder turns of fate, he might well have changed the course of history in not one but two fields—first, by ushering in a simpler, purer, and more generous Christianity and, second, by prompting a more curious and effective medical science. Instead, Michael Servetus was hunted down and burned at the stake.

His execution marked a turning point in the quest for freedom of expression. Although thousands had been executed for heresy before him and others would be executed after, the extraordinary nature of both Servetus the man and Servetus the representative of honest and passionate dissent rippled through Europe in ways that his enemies had never foreseen.

Servetus's detractors, and indeed some of his supporters, have denounced him as an extremist—obsessed, inflexible, and blind to the forces around him. Yet it was these very qualities that compelled his refusal to compromise his beliefs even unto death. And it was that refusal, in turn, that drove his enemies to drop their mask of righteousness and exert the full force of repression to silence him. And so the Servetus trial stands with other, similar affairs like the Dreyfus case and the Scopes trial as a testament to courage of conscience. These cases become starting points at which other champions of justice and fairness may draw a line and say, "This was wrong:'

Even so, had he lived just a century earlier, Servetus might have ended up a forgotten figure, or at best a myth. The difference for him was the development of printing and the spread of books. The three copies of Christianismi Restitutio that survived virtually became surrogates for their author, going into hiding and relying on secret supporters for protection until, centuries later, they could be safely read and appreciated. The book kept alive the spirit of the man and the evidence of his genius, so that other men of similar spirit and genius—Leibniz, Voltaire, Priestley, Jefferson, and Osler—might draw inspiration from Servetus's unsparing quest for truth. Today, 450 years later, we are richer for it.

Sermon: “Michael Servetus: Unitarian Martyr” -Rev. Paul Sprecher

Jane Rzepka imagines Michael Servetus’ life as it might have been reflected in his mother’s diary.

VILLANUEVA, HUESCA PROVINCE, SPAIN: August 13th 1513.

It's good to be alive! Today we move to a grand new house, the most wonderful in the village—and near the parish church. Perhaps one day little Michael – just two now – will be a priest there.

June 30th 1528.

Michael is studying at the University of Toulouse, the most celebrated in all of Europe. I am so proud of him! He has learned Latin, Greek and Hebrew in addition to his studies in law.

Michael [has been reading the Bible in Greek and he] says that there is not a word about the Trinity in the Bible. He believes Christ to be a man—Jesus of Nazareth—not eternal at all. He is intensely taken with this idea. It consumes him. It isn't healthy. Our son is too young to see the dangers. How innocent he is. But will he listen to his parents?

I have lost patience with this difficult child, this schoolboy! He has been given nothing but the best and yet he is so wrong-headed. He has called the Pope a "beast of beasts most wicked". Oh, where will it end?

June 3rd 1531.

[Michael has published a book called] The Errors of the Trinity. He has made people very angry—much to his surprise. Now that he has declared both Catholics and Protestants to be wrong, he is hunted everywhere…. Michael must be terrified and lonely now. He has been foolish but he meant no harm. He is only a boy. Is this the way with all young people? Or is Michael possessed? Oh, how my heart aches.

July 10th 1552.

It is now some twenty years since Michael disappeared [to escape the Inquisition]. He [studied] medicine and has written a popular little book on syrups. If only he can keep his nose out of religion! He is a very popular doctor. He is a good boy.

October 30th 1553.

Michael is dead, [burned at the stake in Geneva, where the reformer John Calvin – his bitter enemy – is in charge]. The fool. I was bitter with grief and anger.

Michael went out of his way to cause trouble. Though [he] had not broken any of Geneva's laws, he was arrested and imprisoned. There was a trial. Michael, of course, was insolent. He denied the Trinity and the eternal Divinity of Christ. He even rejected infant baptism, calling it an invention of the Devil! After weeks in prison, gnawed at by rats and without a single change of clothes, he was found guilty of heresy and sentenced to death. They encouraged him to recant. He would not. Even the slightest show of modesty would have given them an excuse to spare his life.

Michael was burned with his books. A dreamer, an exasperating dreamer! My son was drawn to trouble, but he loved Jesus devotedly and cherished the Bible far above all other books. May God have mercy on his soul.[i]

Poor Michael Servetus must indeed have been a handful for his mother. He was extraordinarily precocious. He was able to read French, Latin, Greek and Hebrew by the time he was sixteen. Born as he was in Spain in September of 1511, less than twenty years after the Spanish Inquisition had driven out all Jews and Muslims who wouldn’t convert to Catholicism – Hebrew most likely have required study in secret with a rabbi or Jewish scholar who was willing to take grave a risk to teach him. His parents would have had the memory of that savage inquisition very much in mind as they watched their son begin to read the Bible in the original languages, an undertaking forbidden to all but the most trusted scholars. Jane Rzepka imagines that Michael’s mother might have reflected on those dangers something like this:

For the first time in many years I recalled a Jewish servant of my neighbours. She had accepted baptism long before the Inquisition began, but continued her observance of the Jewish holidays.

When the Inquisitor came to our village, she was brought before him and questioned. She was asked to declare her faith in the Holy Trinity and the Divinity of Christ Jesus, the Eternal Son of God. She could not. Three times she was pressed to answer. Three times she refused. She was taken out to the market place and burned.

All this appeared to me in an instant and I thought: "If the Church would embrace all people, why should it put such barriers in their way?" Our village had been so peaceful before the Inquisitor came. Then burnings, torture, imprisonment. We looked at each other with suspicion or shame.[ii]

While his mother was proud of her son’s accomplishments – as any mother would be – she was also aware that he was skating very close to the edge of heresy simply by reading the Bible and making discoveries there that the Catholic Church would have preferred not to engage with. Her son was a polymath who distinguished himself in three very different fields – theology, philology – editing and translating ancient manuscripts from Greek and Hebrew, and medicine. He was one of the most brilliant men in his age in all of Europe.

By the time he was twenty, he had published the first of his theological treatises, On the Errors of the Trinity. While his passionate arguments about the Trinity might seem quite obscure to us now – if not indeed bizarre – his book struck at the very heart of the claims of the Catholic Church to be the sole intermediary between human beings and God. Thus the claim that there could be no salvation outside the church, so that anyone who did not adhere closely to the theology taught by the church could be accused of heresy, tortured and murdered, and condemned to spend an eternity in hell.

The doctrine of the Trinity was central to these claims. As Lawrence and Nancy Goldstone explain in Out of the Flames, their account of the life of Servetus,

For the Church hierarchy the problem with [denial of the doctrine of the Trinity – a controversy] that was to plague Christianity for more than a millennium [starting around 300 C.E.] —was that if Jesus was concluded to be less than divine, he might have been simply a man made divine through faith and acts. And if that were true, might not that same potential be available to all men? And if that were so, how could the Church hold itself to be the irreplaceable intermediary between man and God, a position from which, even back in the fourth century, it derived its enormous political power?[iii]

The doctrine of the Trinity was adopted by the church at the Council of Nicaea in 325 C.E., about 300 years after Jesus was crucified. The council was called by and presided over by the Emperor Constantine, the first Roman Emperor to convert to Christianity and to promote conversion of his subjects – this after three centuries of Roman persecution of Christians and the death and torture of hundreds of Christians who chose martyrdom rather than denying their faith in Jesus Christ. This willingness to accept martyrdom actually strengthened the church because so many were ready to die rather than give up their beliefs. It was said in those early days that, “the blood of martyrs is the seed of the church.” Emperor Constantine, though hardly a theologian, was the one who suggested the exact wording of the Nicene Creed that proclaimed the doctrine of the Trinity. As Emperor, Constantine had good reason to insist that Jesus Christ was equal with and of the very nature of God, since his own predecessors as emperor had claimed that they were divine, that they themselves were gods. It would hardly do for the ruler of the Roman Empire to worship anyone less exalted than God; hence it was necessary that Jesus Christ, human as he was on earth, must be, in fact, God. This same claim, in turn, cemented the power of the Pope in Rome. The adoption of the Nicene Creed became the justification for the use of the Roman army to attack anyone who refused to accept its doctrines, the first time that Christians used military force to attack and kill other Christians who disagreed with a doctrine. Now heretics were subject not only to ostracism, but potentially to death.

In other words, the attack that Servetus launched against the Church’s doctrine was not an obscure theological point at all, but an attack on the very foundations of the power of the Church. It was the single most distinctive difference between Christians and Muslims and Jews, and for this reason the Spanish Inquisition demanded all of its victims to declare their belief in the Trinity or face torture or even death. This was one of the reasons other Reformers of the era like Luther, Zwingli, Melanchthon and Calvin chose not to proclaim their own doubts about the doctrine openly. Servetus, though, armed with the certainty and passion of his youth, was determined to strike that hornet’s nest directly on behalf of what he was absolutely certain was the truth.

Servetus himself had been turned against the papacy when he witnessed the coronation of Charles V of Spain as emperor by Pope Clement VII in Bologna when Servetus was just eighteen. As the Goldstones recount, “The pope, wearing a triple gold crown, was carried from his palace to the Church of St Petronius in a golden chair under a golden canopy. When the pope arrived at the church, Charles kissed his foot and begged to be received as [the pope’s] son.”[iv] Servetus wrote years later that, while others were ecstatic to experience the presence of the Pope, he was disgusted by the pomp and extraordinary wealth on display. Unlike those who managed to kiss the Pope’s feet or sandals and “deemed themselves happy beyond the others and proclaimed to have attained the greatest of indulgences and … [remitted] the punishments of hell … for many years,” Servetus saw only “the most evil of beasts, harlots most shameless.”[v]

After his book on the Trinity was published, he was forced to go into hiding to escape the Inquisition and near-certain death. He fled to Lyon, where he was engaged by one of the publishing houses there as a proofreader in part because he had mastered five languages. Soon he was entrusted with a much greater responsibility as editor of the definitive version of Ptolemy’s Geography. Ptolemy, of course, was the Greek philosopher who created the heliocentric model of the solar system, which placed the earth at the center, the model that Galileo was to disprove a century after Servetus.

After a highly successful stint as editor, Servetus enrolled at the University of Paris to study medicine and went on to become a very successful physician. As part of his study and practice of medicine, he came to realize that earlier theories about the circulation of blood through the human body were incorrect. It was held that blood passed from one chamber of the heart directly to the other. In fact, as Servetus was the first to publish, blood passes from one side of the heart through the lungs and then returns to the other side.

It was another job as editor late in his medical career that rekindled Servetus’ obsession with theology and with the doctrine of the Trinity, this time revising a definitive translation of the Bible into Latin from the original Greek and Hebrew texts. His knowledge of Hebrew enabled him to correct some long-standing mistranslations, of which the most notable was his translation of Isaiah 7:14, famous as the basis for the claim in the New Testament that Jesus was born of a virgin. The translation we know best from the King James Bible and from Handel’s Messiah reads “Behold, a virgin shall conceive and bear a child.” Servetus corrected a misunderstanding of the Hebrew and translated “virgin” correctly as “a young marriageable woman.”

His appetite for theology whetted again, he proceeded to write another book, The Restoration of Christianity, in which he attacked centuries of what he saw as false doctrines taught by the Catholic Church as well as by the Protestant Reformers. It was this book that led him into his final, fatal confrontation with the authorities, this time with John Calvin, the reformer who ruled Geneva with an iron fist. Servetus was passing through Geneva while fleeing from the Inquisition yet again – perhaps because he couldn’t resist a debate with Calvin, with whom he had corresponded over the years. Not surprisingly, Calvin had rejected his heretical doctrines. The side-trip through Geneva proved fatal; Servetus was arrested, tortured, and finally burned at the stake with what were believed to be the last copies of his heretical book – though in fact three copies survived his death.

His martyrdom – one of the very few carried out by one Reformer against another – proved a turning point in the development of tolerance among Protestant sects. As one of those who attacked Calvin’s murder of Servetus put it, “To kill a man is not to defend a doctrine, but to kill a man.” It was just fifteen years after the death of Servetus at the age of 41 that the Unitarian King John Sigismund of Transylvania promulgated his Edict of Toleration, thus making Transylvania the first state to declare that everyone should have the freedom to believe and worship as directed by their own conscience.

Rev. Peter Morales, President of the Unitarian Universalist Association, sums up the importance of Servetus to our religious tradition this way:

At first glance, nothing could seem more esoteric and removed from our lives than a re-examination of the writings of a theologian born 500 years ago. The disputes which occupied Servetus and his contemporaries are not matters we debate today. The arguments strike us as tedious. On closer examination, the religious controversy that cost Servetus his life is all too modern. The particular points of doctrine may not concern us today. However, the central problems of religious authority, religious freedom and the search for common understanding across different religious traditions are very much with us today. And, sadly, conflict fuelled by religious differences kills people every day. Servetus dared to use reason and evidence to counter religious hierarchy and authority. He was willing to call for tolerance and humility in religious debate. He was courageous enough to look outside the scriptures of his own faith tradition. He sought to cross cultural borders…. His struggles are our struggles. Michael Servetus may have been born 500 years ago, but the issues he faced are our issues. To know Servetus is to know ourselves.[vi]

It matters what we believe, and it matters that we are willing to defend our beliefs against the forces of intolerance and coercion of conscience.

Sophia Lyon Fahs, one of the great religious educators in our tradition, sums this up in these words:

Some beliefs are like walled gardens. They encourage exclusiveness, and the feeling of being especially privileged.

Other beliefs are expansive and lead the way into wider and deeper sympathies.

Some beliefs are like shadows, clouding children's days with fears of unknown calamities.

Other beliefs are like sunshine, blessing children with the warmth of happiness.

Some beliefs are divisive, separating the saved from the unsaved, friends from enemies.

Other beliefs are bonds in a world community, where sincere differences beautify the pattern.

Some beliefs are like blinders, shutting off the power to choose one's own direction.

Other beliefs are like gateways opening wide vistas for exploration.

Some beliefs weaken a person's selfhood. They blight the growth of resourcefulness.

Other beliefs nurture self-confidence and enrich the feeling of personal worth.

Some beliefs are rigid, like the body of death, impotent in a changing world.

Other beliefs are pliable, like the young sapling, ever growing with the upward thrust of life.[vii]

As we look to our own living, may our lives – like the life of Michael Servetus – be exemplars of conscience, of firmness, and of willingness to hold fast to that which we are compelled by our own conscience to believe.

May it be so, and Amen.