GENEVA AND THE STATE OF POLITICAL PARTIES AT THE DATE OF SERVETUS’S
ARREST.
‘The year 1553,’ says Beza, in his life of Calvin, ‘by the impatience
and fury of the factious, was a year so full of trouble that not only
was the Church, but the Republic of Geneva, within a hair’s breadth
of being wrecked and lost; all power had fallen into the hands of the
wicked (i.e., the patriotic party of freethought, opposed to Calvin,
and designated the Libertines), that it seemed as though they were
on the point of attaining the ends for which they had so long been
striving.’ Eighteen years had then elapsed since the Reformation
first found footing in Geneva, and twelve since Calvin had resumed
his position--interrupted during a period of two years--as a sort of
spiritual dictator--‘the Lycurgus of a Christian Democracy’--not only
as Organiser of the Faith, and Minister in the Church, but as regulator
and supervisor of the morals and manners of the people.
The Reformation, in so far as Geneva was concerned, seems to have been
hailed on political much more than on religious grounds. Emancipation
from the yoke of the Roman Catholic bishop, under which its citizens
had long fretted, meant escape from the political machinations,
through the Priest, of France on the one hand, of Savoy on the other.
The change from Romanism to Protestantism appears to have been due,
in fact, to no particular discontent of the Genevese with the old
Popish forms, or to any zeal for the new doctrines of Luther and his
followers, but to a cherished hope of being suffered to pass their
lives with as little control as might be from authority of any kind,
and that little imposed and administered by themselves.
Moral discipline was notoriously lax over Europe in the early years of
the sixteenth century, nowhere perhaps more so than at Geneva; and the
liberty after which its people sighed was often understood as license
rather than as life within the limits of moral law. Accident, however,
having brought John Calvin, already a man of mark, to Geneva in the
course of the year 1536, he was seized upon by William Farel, then in
principal charge of the spiritual concerns of the city, and yielding
to his most urgent entreaties--conjured, indeed, in the name of God,
to remain and aid in the work of the Reformation--Calvin consented to
cast in his lot with the Genevese, still jubilant over their lately
recovered liberties and little amenable to discipline of any kind.
A more unlikely conjunction of elements can hardly be conceived than
that of the ascetic, gloomy Calvin with the lively, self-indulgent
Genevese, to whom life meant present enjoyment, and religion a pleasant
addition to existence on festivals and Sundays, to be put off and on
with their holiday garments and less to be thought of than the next
excursion to the mountains in summer, or the approaching assembly for
merriment and the dance in winter.
To Calvin life and its import wore a totally different aspect. To him
the present was but a prelude to the future, a discipline preparing for
eternity, and religion therefore the great end and aim of existence.
Anchorite himself in the truest sense of the word, he would possibly
have had herbs the food, the crystal spring the drink of the community.
Fatalist too to a great extent through his doctrine of election and
predestination, the joys of life--if life perchance had any joys--and
its trials--and they were many, were to be taken with like passiveness
and equanimity. Even the inclemencies of the seasons, as dispensations
of providence, were not to be over-anxiously guarded against: the
school-house windows, it is true, were to be glazed or protected in
some sort by diaphanous skins or horn; but this was to be no higher
than their lower halves; and in so much only that the snow-drift, the
wind and the rain might not interfere with the work of the scholars.
Conscious himself, through natural endowment and added learning, of
superiority to all about him, Calvin had little or no sympathy with the
liberty the Genevese were so proud of having achieved. A despotism
was his ideal of civil government; and his proclaimed purpose from the
first in settling at Geneva was to make the city a stronghold of the
Gospel, its people subjects of the Lord, and their faith and morals a
model of all that had been proposed by the Reformation in the sense in
which he understood it. And how much he differed in this from Luther,
and Zwingli, need not be said. The
Wer liebt nicht Weiber, Wein und Gesang
Ein Narr ist er und bleibts sein Lebenslang[68]
of him of the Wartburg, must have sounded as simple profanity to Calvin.
That Calvin’s heavy hand was borne with by the Genevese for two years,
in the first instance, with no small amount of discontent, indeed, but
with no outbreak of rebellion, must be set down, we imagine, to the
credit of human nature, which endures for a season the irksome and
even the ill, in hope of the good to follow; but when the pressure
is crushing, and there is no prospect of alleviation, resistance,
inevitably, follows in the end.
Calvin and the special Court he had inaugurated under the title of
the Consistory, had been anxious to impose some new and still more
stringent ordinance on the city, but the Council, whose sanction was
required before any of the consistorial edicts could have way, refused
assent, and the citizens, emboldened by this, forthwith appeared in
open rebellion against what they rightly construed as the tyranny
and self-assertion of the clergy. So unpopular in fact did the whole
clerical party become at this time, that its leader and his colleague
Farel were formally banished from the city, and the subordinate
ministers had to shrink into something like obscurity if they would
escape the necessity of accompanying them.
In sore displeasure with the ungrateful conduct of the people, as
he regarded it, Calvin sought shelter first in Basle and then in
Strasburg, where he was welcomed by his brother Reformers, and by and
by provided with honourable means of subsistence, by an appointment as
Professor of Theology in the University.
But he was not destined long to enjoy the leisure of the Professor’s
chair. Before two years had elapsed, the more moderate, orderly, and
pious party had come again into power in Geneva, and he was waited on
by a deputation, headed by Amied Perrin, a man of the highest influence
among his fellow citizens, and entreated to return and save them from
themselves; orderly existence, not otherwise attainable as it seemed,
being seen after all to be not too dearly bought even by heavy payments
in the shape of subserviency to theocratic rule.
Calvin returned to Geneva, then, and under circumstances that gave him
a great advantage over the difficulties he had formerly encountered
in carrying into effect the system of discipline he was bent on
introducing. Perrin’s appearance at the head of the deputation to
Strasburg, he had seen as an omen of the best augury; for Perrin’s
influence in the Civic Council was very great, and his approval of any
measure proposed, was taken as a sufficient guarantee by the citizens
at large, of its value. But Perrin was ambitious, and certainly
reckoned without his host when he hoped by patronising John Calvin to
make him in any way the instrument of his own selfish or party designs;
Two stars keep not their orbit in one sphere;
and if Perrin was bent on power, so was Calvin.
Perrin, it may be, had never heartily sympathised with the Reformation
in its religious aspects; he certainly sympathised still less with
the Reformer. A man of pleasure at heart, he was perhaps somewhat
indifferent to religion. Ready enough to abet Calvin in his austerities
towards the many, he was minded to keep his own neck and the necks
of his friends out of the yoke. Calvin, however, had no idea of
anything of the kind: his law was of general application, or it had
no significance; his rule was _one_ and it was for all. No wonder,
therefore, that Perrin’s league with the Reformer came to an end ere
long; and that when it was not open dissidence between them, it was
always smouldering enmity.
Calvin’s grand instrument in enforcing his discipline was the
Consistory, an assembly made up of the entire acting clergy of Geneva,
with a limited number--no more than twelve--of the laity added. This
body was entrusted with very extensive powers, which it may be imagined
were not suffered to lie idle, when we find it pretending to regulate
the head, and even the foot, gear of the women; intruding itself into
the dwellings of the people, too, and looking into their saucepans and
pint pots to see that there was no indulgence in the way of eating and
drinking!
Supported by a certain number of the native Genevese, Calvin’s hands
were immensely strengthened by the crowd of refugees for conscience
sake who poured into Geneva from France and Italy, to escape the
persecution that had already begun to rage in these countries. Henry
II. of France, having presented his mistress, Diana of Poitiers,
with the proceeds of all confiscations for heresy, her agents were
indefatigable in hunting out converts to the doctrines of Luther and
bringing them to justice, as it was called: the greater the number of
heretics burned, the higher rose the fame for piety of the profligate
king, and in like measure the revenue of the heartless courtesan.
The refugees as a rule, and almost as a matter of necessity, were
entirely devoted to the Reformer; and having been most liberally met
by the Genevese at first, and put on a footing of all but perfect
political equality, they made themselves felt, through their numbers,
in the frequently recurring elections that formed elements in the
Genevese Republican system. Favoured in all by Calvin, the strangers,
as they increased in numbers, came at length to be ever more and more
disliked and distrusted by the native population; so that Calvin may be
found using language such as this, when, speaking in the same breath of
the fugitives, his friends, and of the people who sheltered both him
and them within their walls:--‘They (the Genevese) are dissatisfied
with you (the Refugees), because you run not riot with them in their
disorderly and barren lives.’ The native population, in a word, found
themselves, ere long, controlled and overcrowed by a host of aliens,
led by a bigoted and intolerant ecclesiastic--a state of things never
to be patiently endured, but to be ended at the first favourable
moment; and it is to the culminating dissatisfaction of the Genevese
with clerical rule in 1553, much akin to that of the year 1538, when
Calvin had been forced to quit the field, that Beza refers in the
passage quoted above.
So unpopular had Calvin again become in the year 1553, that, in
writing to one of his friends, he speaks of discontent and distrust
as universally prevalent, especially among the more youthful of the
population. ‘The accumulated rancour of their hearts,’ he says, ‘breaks
out from time to time; so that when I show myself in the street, the
curs are hounded on me: hiss! hiss! is shouted to them; and they snap
at my legs and tear my clothes.’ Calvin must in truth have had a trying
time of it during most of the years he lived among the Genevese;
his own bed could as little have been of roses without thorns, as he
suffered the beds of the citizens to be of down; for, save during
brief lulls, he and they seem to have passed their lives in a state of
covert, when it was not one of open, warfare.
One of the earlier hostile moves of the civil Council in the present
crisis against the Reformer was the exclusion, from the Greater Council
of the State, of some members of the Minor Council, known to be among
the number of his adherents. More than this, his enemies having come
to outnumber his friends in the lately elected Council, he found
himself frequently outvoted in directions in which he had been used to
think of his wish or his will as already the law. Among those who had
now obtained a seat in the Supreme Council, was one whom he had put
under the consistorial ban for some infringement of discipline, and
forbidden, until he showed signs of amendment, to present his child
for baptism. To choose Councillors from among persons such as this,
however, was, in Calvin’s eyes, to fly in the face not only of all
authority, but of the Almighty himself.
Another move against him was a resolution taken by the Council to
deprive the Refugees of the arms with which they, like the native
population, had been entrusted at an earlier period for the common
defence. This was taken greatly to heart by Calvin, who stigmatised it
as a ‘barbarous and brutal act, perpetrated by enemies of the Gospel
against exiles for Christ’s sake.’ But the Council did not stop here
in showing its hostile mood. The priests, in the olden time, had
been privileged like the rest of the Community to be present at the
deliberations of the Council, and the Ministers, their successors,
had never been challenged in their title to show themselves as
auditors in the same way. They were now, however, by a resolution of
the Council, declared incompetent to appear at its sittings without
special permission given. Of no great moment in itself or politically
considered, this interdict pointed with even needless significance
to mislike and mistrust of the clergy as a body, and of their
distinguished head in particular--the Council would neither have him
nor his followers immediately informed of all the business they had in
hand.
How keenly all these proceedings were felt by Calvin is apparent from
the tone of the letters he wrote to more than one of his friends at
this time. To his friend Sulzer, of Basle, he says that for the last
two years they pass their lives at Geneva as if they were living amid
the declared enemies of the Gospel! and he complains bitterly of the
interference he suffers in the exercise of his multifarious functions.
Among the particular incidents that tended to widen the breach between
Calvin with the ecclesiastical party behind him, and the civil
authorities backed by the more liberally disposed of the citizens,
was the case of Philibert Berthelier, one of the Councillors, a man
of note, respected and much looked up to by the Genevese; for he
was the son of that Philibert Berthelier who had nobly striven for
the liberties of the city, in former years, and gone to his death on
the scaffold in their assertion. Berthelier, some eighteen months
or so before, for an offence against one or other of the arbitrary
ordinances of the Consistory--for having gone to a ball with his wife
and daughter, we think, they having further exceeded in the matter
of dress--had fallen under the interdict of the Ministers, and been
forbidden to present himself at the celebration of the Lord’s supper,
until he had made submission and promised amendment.
Now Berthelier was not only a man of weight in the Republic
politically, but in the opinion of his fellow citizens, of really
irreproachable life and conversation; and, his friends being then in
power, he took steps to have the interdict removed, which kept him from
gratifying his pious feelings by partaking of the commemorative feast.
To this end he presented a petition to the Council, setting forth the
grievance under which he laboured, and praying for relief; and they,
on their part, took it on them forthwith not only to absolve him of
the disability of which he complained, but, proceeding a step farther,
they declared the Consistory incompetent in time to come to pronounce
sentences of Excommunication at all; transferring the right to do so
from the Ecclesiastical Assembly to the Minor Council of the State.
This was felt by Calvin as the heaviest blow that had yet been dealt
him. Of course he opposed the measure with all his might. Heard in
opposition to its adoption, he declared that if it were maintained
the very foundations of the Reformation, in so far as Religion
was concerned, would be compromised. But all his eloquence was
thrown away; after long and eager discussion the decree was finally
confirmed. Disgusted with the opposition he encountered at every point,
Calvin--though he soon shows that he is anxious to free himself from
any suspicion of the kind--appears at the time to have had serious
thoughts of throwing up his charge and abandoning the city of Geneva to
its own evil devices. It was probably the consciousness that if he left
Geneva he would seem to be turning his back on the whole of the Reform
movement, which kept him from taking the extreme step he may probably
have meditated. He had become accustomed, moreover, to play the despot,
and he who has once indulged in the bitter sweets of arbitrary power
scarcely retires otherwise than by compulsion into the shade of private
life. And then, whither was he to betake himself? Not to France,
though he still looked with longing eyes towards his native country;
for open heresy, such as he must have felt himself bound to profess,
there led inevitably to the stake; neither to Germany, where his own
peculiar views were not popular, and the several centres of the great
and glorious movement towards light and freedom, brought to a head by
Luther, were all adequately occupied. He must stay at Geneva, then,
his ‘coign of vantage;’ abide the storm of the present, and hope for
better days to come. But it was in bitterness of heart, waiting till
reaction had spent itself, and his voice could again be heard as the
voice of authority.
It was at this moment precisely, whilst debate and dispute,
ecclesiastical and civil, were at their height, that Michael Servetus
reached Geneva, and altogether unwittingly and unwillingly on his part
became a subject of contention between the party of free thought,
now in open rebellion against Calvin and the more rigid of his blind
or compliant followers. And we shall possibly see reason to conclude
that Servetus, though tried for heresy and finally condemned and done
to death by slow fire for blasphemy against God, was in some measure
also the victim of the political situation--the scape-goat of the two
parties contending for supremacy in Geneva. Had there been less of
political rancour there in the year 1553, and Servetus been allowed
competent counsel to defend him, it seems to us, on the most careful
consideration of the whole subject, that the proceedings would not
have been suffered to take the turn they did, which led inevitably
to his condemnation to death, whilst the memory of Calvin would have
escaped the portentous blot that goes so far to obscure all the other
great qualities that attach to his name. The world might then have had
triumphs within the domain of physical science other than the discovery
of the lesser circulation of the blood, from the man of genius;
and the Reformation--type of the holy cause of human progress--have
advanced without the lamentable compromise of principle it suffered
when its leaders sent one of the very foremost men of his age to the
stake.
In presence of the individual he had come to look on as his personal
enemy as well as the enemy of God, Calvin appears to have forgotten
all his earlier aspirations after toleration. He was not now thinking
of himself as editor of ‘Seneca on Clemency,’ when to the text of
his author enjoining self-control or moderation of mind--_animi
temperantia_--having the power to take vengeance, he adds: ‘It belongs
to the nature of the merciful man that he not only uses opportunities
of vengeance with moderation, but does not avail himself of even the
most tempting occasions to take revenge;’[69]--a noble sentence, but
written in days long past, when he saw persecution for conscience sake
inaugurated by Francis I. Neither had he himself as author of the
earlier editions of the ‘Institutions’ in his mind, where he is as
emphatic in denouncing the ‘Right of the Sword’ in dealing with heresy
as he was now, having become the spiritual dictator of Geneva, ready to
call it at all times into requisition. Calvin’s natural temperament,
in fact, disposed him to severity in furtherance of his purposes and
his will. We have seen him in his letter to Farel of February 1546,
threatening Servetus with death, did opportunity serve; and writing to
a French lady--Madame de Cany--about or a little before the time that
now engages us, in referring to some one who had behaved ungratefully
both to his correspondent and himself, he says: ‘I assure you, madam,
that had he not taken himself off so speedily, I should have held it my
duty, in so far as it lay with me, to have had him burned alive.’[70]
But everything seemed to conspire against Servetus at the moment of his
reaching Geneva; for almost immediately after his arrival there, and
whilst his presence was still unknown to Calvin, the Reformer received
a letter from a correspondent, Paul Gaddi of Cremona by name, that
must have greatly strengthened his fears of Servetus’s objectionable
influence in the world, and, on theological grounds, confirmed him
in his purpose of pushing matters to extremities and silencing the
dangerous heretic for ever, did he but find the opportunity. Gaddi,
as it seems, had lately reached Zürich from the north of Italy. At
Ferrara, he informs his correspondent that he had had many long and
interesting conversations with the Duchess, who showed the very best
and most friendly dispositions towards the Reformed Faith. But she was
sorely in want of a competent person, ‘a faithful Minister of the word
of God,’ as a guide against those by whom she was surrounded. Gaddi,
therefore, at the desire of the Duchess requests Calvin to send her
some one who would give her true instruction, and free her from the
teaching ‘of the miserable Monk she has at her elbow, who seeks not
after what Christ requires, but after the things that be profitable to
himself.’
‘Much have I seen in these [northern] Italian cities,’
continues Gaddi, ‘and many have I met with who profess Christ;
but few and far between are those who faithfully serve the
Lord. Various, truly, are the heresies that there abound, so
that the land is, in truth, a very Babylon. This, you may be
sure, I have not beheld without extreme distress of mind and
tearful eyes; but the heresy that flourishes the most of all,
is the doctrine of the proud and Satanic Servetus, insomuch
that many of the faithful entreat you to come forward, and
controvert his writings; a task to which they think you are
the more bound to apply yourself, as he boasts that no one has
yet dared to write against him. I, too, if my entreaty may be
of any avail, beseech you to undertake the business. I know
the influence your writings have with all in Italy, who fear
God. If you deigned to take pen in hand against George [he had
published a tract against predestination], who was every way
unworthy of your notice, for he was plunged in the deepest
ignorance, how much rather ought you to come forward against
this diabolical spirit, who is looked on by so many as having
the highest authority in matters of doctrine. And truly his
teaching, though it be of the most impious and pestilent kind,
is calculated to impose on those whose eyes serve them not to
see far before them. Wherefore, I entreat you yet again, to
undertake the task I propose. Postpone, I pray you, for a few
days your other studies; betake you to this most necessary
work, and be the hammer that shall smite the enemy.
Your most devoted,
PAULUS GADIUS CREMONENSIS.
Zürich, July 23rd, 1553.[71]