THE TRIAL IN ITS SECOND PHASE--_continued_.
When the Court assembled, on August 23, a series of articles, embodying
what may be characterised as a new Act of Impeachment, was presented
to it by M. Rigot the Attorney-General, headed as follows: ‘These are
the questions and articles on which the Attorney-General of Geneva
proposes to interrogate Michael Servetus, prisoner, accused of heresy,
blasphemy, and disturbance of the peace of Christendom.’
The questions and articles now presented differ materially from those
proposed in the first instance by Calvin in the name of his man,
Nicolas de la Fontaine. These, we have seen, refer almost exclusively
to the speculative theological opinions of Servetus, his disrespectful
treatment of Calvin, and his challenge of the doctrine preached in the
Church of Geneva. The articles of the Attorney-General bear on matters
more purely personal to the prisoner; on his antecedents; his relations
with the theologians of Basle and Germany; the printing of his books,
more particularly the last of them, and the fatal consequences that
must follow from its publication; his coming to Geneva, and so on.
Save his views on Infant Baptism, his other dogmatical opinions are
not particularly specified or brought prominently forward; and his
differences with Calvin and the Church of Geneva are not even hinted
at. The theological element in the prosecution, in a word, is almost
entirely abandoned for denunciations of the socially dangerous nature
of the prisoner’s doctrines, and his persistence in their dissemination.
In the present mood of the Court, and aspect of the prosecution, it
would almost seem that had Servetus been guilty of nothing more than
offences in the region of speculative theology and the use of uncivil
language towards Calvin and the Church of Geneva, his delinquencies
would not have put him beyond the pale of escape from all but
punishment of a secondary or insignificant kind. The Attorney-General’s
articles appear in fact to have been framed under the mistaken idea
that Servetus, through the whole course of his life, had been an
immoral and so a dangerous and turbulent spirit, of the kind with which
he was himself, perhaps, but too familiar in the City of Geneva. He did
not, any more than Calvin and the other Reformers, think of Servetus as
he was in truth--a speculative, yet perfectly pious scholar, intent on
bringing the Reformation of Christian doctrine, begun by Luther, still
nearer to the simplicity of Apostolic, or even of pre-Apostolic, times;
for Michael Servetus had the mind to see and to say that there was a
Christian Religion, based on love of God and man, with added faith in
its Author, before there were any Gospels; so that these are truly but
the varying and often discrepant reports of the Master’s teaching, with
mythological accretions and interpolated Greek philosophoumena.
Rigot appears from his articles, which have no look of having been
dictated by Calvin, to have regarded Servetus as one whose efforts from
first to last had been directed to the confusion of society through the
teaching of an immoral doctrine and the example of a dissolute life.
To force an avowal of so much from the lips of the prisoner himself
was therefore the main drift of the Attorney’s interrogatories. Must
not the prisoner be aware, said he, that his teaching gives licence to
youth to overflow in debauchery, adultery, and other social crimes,
as he maintains that there is neither sin nor misdemeanour in such
misdeeds, and no punishment due to them under the age of twenty years?
Why had he not himself entered into the holy state of matrimony? Had he
not studied the Koran and other profane books for arguments in favour
of Jews, Turks, and the like, and to controvert the doctrines of all
the Christian Churches? Had he not been imprisoned elsewhere than at
Vienne through having been guilty of various crimes and misdemeanours?
Had he not been a party to quarrels in which he had wounded another as
well as been wounded himself? If he had not led a dissolute and immoral
life, showing neither care nor zeal for all that became a Christian,
what could have induced him to treat adversely so much that lies
at the root of the Christian Religion? Had he not come, in fact, to
Geneva with a view to spread his doctrines and to trouble the Church as
there established? With whom had he had communication since he came?
Had he not spoken with William Geroult, and was not Geroult aware of
his intention to come to Geneva? and so on, in the same strain, the
questions amounting to as many as thirty.
But this was ground on which Servetus felt himself secure; he could
reply to all that was asked of him now with a clear conscience, and
without reticence or prevarication. He had nothing to hide in his past
life. No moral delinquency had been laid to his charge, and though he
may have had a squabble with the Faculty of Paris, the doctors were
notoriously a contentious crew, always quarrelling among themselves,
though they never, like the theologians, went the length of burning
one another. There was little, therefore, to be said on that head; for
the rest, he had lived soberly, honourably, industriously; earning his
bread in the sweat of his brain, and for the last twelve or fourteen
years had been incessantly engaged in the practice of his profession,
neither using the sword nor the spear, but salving the bruises and
stanching the wounds that men in their madness inflict on one another,
and nobly ministering to the yet longer list of ills in the shape of
fevers, fluxes, consumptions, apoplexies, cancers, dropsies, &c., &c.,
that waylay us on our course and give us rest at length.
The task which the public Prosecutor had set himself of showing up
Servetus as an ill-conditioned and quarrelsome person, as a debauchee
and evil-liver, and in the imputed licentiousness and irregularities of
his life to find a motive for his attack on the dogmas of the Christian
faith, was, therefore, a complete failure.
The Attorney-General of Geneva did not imagine, as it seems, that the
man who differed in his speculative theological opinions from the
masses, who follow their leaders like sheep, could be other than an
enemy to both God and man.
All the charges in the direction now taken, unsupported as they were by
a shadow of evidence, fell to the ground. Servetus could say with truth
that he was no disturber of the peace--had never in the whole course
of his life provoked a personal quarrel, and if he had once drawn his
sword, as hinted, it was not as aggressor, but in self-defence. By
physical constitution he said he was indisposed to matrimony; his not
having entered into that holy state being, as we have seen, one of the
items laid to his charge! Far from having failed in chastity of life,
he declared that he had been ever studious of Scripture precepts on the
subject, and was even bold enough to think that he had always lived as
a Christian. And truly and in so far as aught to the contrary was made
to appear in the course of the protracted and searching trial to which
he was subjected, Servetus must be held to come out stainless. The
logical conclusion, however, that speculative theological opinions,
whether in conformity with or adverse to accredited systems of belief,
had no influence one way or another on man’s moral conduct, was lost
upon Calvin and his age; and the vulgar world of to-day cannot yet be
said to have bettered their opinion.
The prosecution, losing ground the longer it continued on this tack,
reverted to what for it was the surer course--the assumed danger to the
cause of society and the peace of Christendom from the publication of
books having the character ascribed to those written by the prisoner.
In spite of all the warnings he had had, said Mr. Attorney Rigot, the
kind and repeated admonitions of learned theologians, sole authorities
on such subjects, and the unanimous condemnation his first publication
had encountered, he not only continued to adhere to his errors, but
with a view to spread them farther had written and printed a second,
which was in fact but a reproduction and enlarged edition of the first.
To this Servetus answered that he thought he should have offended God
had he not done so; ‘he had acted,’ he said, ‘with as perfect sincerity
as if his salvation had been in question.’ ‘Our Lord,’ he continued,
and quoting the tenth chapter of Matthew, ‘commands us to speak in
Light that we have been told in Darkness; and in the fifth chapter, the
Evangelist says further that we are not to put the Light we have under
a bushel, but to set it where it may be seen of all.’ Taking God and
his conscience for guides, therefore, he thought he was but following
the injunctions of the Scriptures and the ancient Doctors of the Church
in all he had written, nor does he now think that he has done amiss,
for his intentions were good; and, as the Evangelist already quoted
(ch. v.) declares: ‘If the eye be single then is the whole body full of
Light,’ he therefore believes that his intention having been good, the
deed which followed must be accounted good also. As to the printing of
the book entitled ‘The Restoration of Christianity,’ he had no regrets.
He had written and had it printed because he hoped to bring back to
its primitive meaning much that he thought was erroneous in current
interpretations of Christian Doctrine; his title of itself showed that
he intended _the Restoration, not the Destruction_, of Christianity,
with which he had been charged. With all this, however, he did not
presume to say that they who had written before him, and in a different
sense, understood nothing of the Christian Religion; he only thought
they had misconceived and misconstrued some things, they especially who
had formulated their opinions subsequently to the date of the Council
of Nicæa.
To the particular charge that he had spoken of the Doctrine taught in
the Reformed Churches as being nowise Christian, and condemned all who
did not think with himself, he replied that he never imagined that the
Churches of Geneva and Germany were doomed to perdition because of
their teaching; he only thought their ministers mistaken on some things.
At this point, a private letter addressed by the prisoner to Abel
Poupin, one of the Ministers of Geneva, written many years before,
was produced and read to the Court. Whence it came, or how it was
obtained, is not said; but as highly characteristic of the writer, and
foreshadowing the fate that was to befal him, it must have a place in
our story.
Monsieur Abel!--Although it is most plainly shown, in my
twelfth letter to Calvin, that the Law of the Decalogue had
been abrogated, I shall add a few words that you may the better
understand the innovation brought about by the advent of
Christ. If you turn to Jeremiah xxxi., verse 31 _et seq._, you
will find it stated distinctly that the law of the Decalogue
was to be annulled. The prophet teaches that the Covenant
entered into with the Fathers, when they left Egypt, was
to be no longer in force. But this was the Covenant of the
Decalogue. For in I Kings, chapter viii., it is said that the
Covenant or Testimony--the Decalogue, to wit--was in the Ark
with the Fathers at their exodus from Egypt, whence the Ark is
called the Ark of the Covenant, that is of the Tables, or Ten
Commandments of the Law. Now this was the form of the Covenant:
God promised the Israelites that they should be his people, if
they did according to the words of the Law, and they on their
part engaged that they would obey them. Such was the Covenant.
And it is of this Covenant that Jeremiah (chapter xviii.)
speaks as being repealed, as does Ezekiel (chapter xvi.), and
Paul likewise in his Epistle to the Hebrews. If God took us
for his own under that Law, we should lie under the curse, and
perish by its pressure. The Law therefore was repealed. God
does not now receive us as his children but by faith in his
beloved Son, Jesus Christ. See then what becomes of your Gospel
when it is confounded with the Law. Your Gospel is without the
One God, without true faith, without good works. For the One
God you have a three-headed Cerberus; for faith a fatal dream,
and good works you say are vain shows. Faith in Christ is to
you mere sham, effecting nothing; Man a mere log, and your God
a chimæra of subject-will. You do not acknowledge celestial
regeneration by the washing with water, but treat it as an idle
tale, and close the kingdom of heaven against mankind as a
thing of imagination. Woe to you, woe, woe!
This, my third Epistle, is addressed to you with the wish
that you may be brought to better thoughts, and I mean not to
admonish you any more. It offends you, perchance, that I meddle
in those battles of the angel Michael, and seek to bring you
into the strife. But study the part I refer to carefully, and
you will see that there are men who do battle there, exposing
their lives for Christ’s sake. That the Angels speak truth
is proclaimed by the Scriptures. But see you not that the
question is of the Church of Christ fled from Earth these
many years? Is it not of division, of difference that John
himself makes mention? And who is the Accuser challenging us
with transgression of the Law and its precepts? Accusation and
seduction of the world, he says, were to precede the battle;
the battle therefore was to follow, and the time is at hand, as
he also tells us. And who are they who shall gain the victory
over the Beast? They who do not accept his mark. I know for
sure that I shall die in this cause; but my courage does not
fail me because of this; I shall show me a disciple worthy of
my master.
I much regret that, through you, I am not allowed to amend some
places in my writings now in Calvin’s hands. Farewell, and look
for no more letters from me.
I stand to my post and meditate, and look out for what may
further come to pass. For come it will, surely it will come and
that without long delay.[84]
This remarkable letter, interesting in so many respects, is
unfortunately without a date; it is the last of three he had written,
however, and must have been produced either in 1546, or early in 1547.
Highly characteristic of the self-confidence and assurance of the
writer, we see him as ready to challenge the Reformers as they were
eager to denounce him. He does not call them heretics and blasphemers,
it is true, nor does he speak of having them punished for the mistaken
views they entertain; and therein he shows himself their superior.
Crying woe upon them for their errors, he never hints at the propriety
of burning them alive, though he is not blind to the great probability
of being subjected himself to a fate of the kind.
The letter to Abel Poupin, said Servetus to his Judges, contains
scholastic disputations on difficult subjects, in the course of which
controversialists make use of strong language with no purpose but
to enforce their views or bring their opponents to the same way of
thinking as themselves, and not because they believe them to be lost
souls by reason of the dissimilar opinions they entertain. For himself,
he continues, he had had more objectionable terms of reproach applied
to him, than any he had used to others; and these not by word of mouth
or in private letters like his own, but through printed books both in
the French and Latin tongues. What he had written to M. Abel, now more
than six years ago, was with no view to publicity, but simply to elicit
the truth--certainly with no intention of slandering the Republic of
Geneva and its Churches.
On the important question of baptism, he admitted being of opinion that
they who were baptized in their infancy were not truly baptized; but
added, that if it were shown him he was mistaken in this, he was ready
to amend and ask forgiveness.
The prosecutor reverting to the book lately printed and asking the
prisoner if he did not think it was calculated, through the doctrine it
taught, to bring great troubles on Christendom? he replied that he did
not think his book calculated to introduce dispute or difference among
Christians; on the contrary, he thought it would be found profitable,
and give occasion to the better spirits among men to speak better
things; and the truth, once admitted and proclaimed by the few, would
by and by spread to the many.
Challenged with having come to Geneva to disseminate his doctrines
and sow dissension among the Churches, he gave sufficient reason for
his presence among them when he said that he had only come on his way
to Italy, having been turned from his first intention of trying to
reach his native country, after his escape from the prison of Vienne,
through fear of arrest by the police of France.
It is but fair to infer, as M. Albert Rilliet observes, that the
present bearing of Servetus, and the moderation and pertinence of his
replies to all the questions put to him, must have made a favourable
impression on the Court. He was not now confronted with Calvin,
in whose presence he seemed to lose all self-control, neither was
he pressed upon questions of speculative theology, upon which he
either dared not declare himself openly, or, if he did, was at once
in opposition to all his Judges knew of religion. In Rigot as his
questioner he had nothing more than an officer discharging a public
duty, not the hostile partisan he had encountered in Colladon who,
as agent of Calvin, may have thought it incumbent on him to give the
most unfavourable turn to everything capable of being construed to the
advantage of the prisoner. The good impression presumed could hardly
fail to be strengthened by the petition of the prisoner addressed to
the Court and read on the next day of the trial, August 24, to this
effect:
_To the most honourable my Lords, the Syndics and Councillors of
Geneva._
The Petition of Michael Servetus, now lying under a criminal
charge, humbly showeth--That it is a thing new and unknown
to the Apostles, Disciples, and ancient Churches, to make
the interpretation of the Scriptures, and questions thence
arising, grounds of criminal accusation. This is clearly
seen from Chapters xviii. and xix. of the Acts of the
Apostles, where accusers are referred to the Churches,
when the matters in question bear upon Religion only. So
too in the time of Constantine, when the Arian heresy was
broached, and accusations were brought on the part both of
Athanasius and Arius, the great Emperor, by his Council and
the Councils of the Churches, decided that, according to the
old doctrine, suits of the kind could not be entertained by
civil tribunals--not even in the case of such notorious heresy
as that of Arius,--but were to be taken into consideration and
decided by the Church. Further, that heretics were either to
be brought to reason by argument, or were to be punished by
banishment, when they proved refractory and refused to amend.
Now that banishment was the award of the ancient Churches
against heretics can be proved by a thousand histories and
authorities. Wherefore, my Lords, in consonance with Apostolic
teaching and the practice of the ancient Church, your
petitioner prays that the Criminal Charge under which he lies
may be discharged.
Secondly, my Lords, I entreat you to consider that I have
committed no offence within your territory; neither, indeed,
have I been guilty of any elsewhere: I have never been
seditious, and am no disturber of the peace. The questions I
discuss in my works are of an abstruse kind, and within the
scope and ken of men of learning only. During all the time I
passed in Germany, I never spoke on such subjects save with
Œcolampadius, Bucer, and Capito; neither in France did I ever
enter on them with anyone. I have always disavowed the opinions
of the Anabaptists, seditious against the magistrate, and
preaching community of goods. Wherefore, as I have been guilty
of no sort of sedition, but have only brought up for discussion
certain ancient doctrines of the Church, I think I ought not
to be detained a prisoner and made the subject of a criminal
prosecution.
In conclusion, my Lords, inasmuch as I am a stranger, ignorant
of the customs of this country, not knowing either how to speak
or comport myself in the circumstances under which I am placed,
I humbly beseech you to assign me an Advocate to speak for me
in my defence. Doing thus, you will assuredly do well, and our
Lord will prosper your Republic.
In the City of Geneva, the 22nd day of August, 1553.
MICHAEL SERVETUS,
In his own cause.
This well-worded, and in its demands most reasonable address, strange
to say, received no notice beyond an order to the clerk of the Court
to enter it on the minutes; the prisoner being at the same time curtly
admonished to go on answering the questions addressed to him. But how
hardly the poor man was being used by his self-constituted Judges we
shall see by the tenor of the next petition he addressed to them. He
had been thrown into one of the foul cells or dungeons appropriated to
criminals of the vilest class, accused of crimes against person and
property; and there, in addition to mental anguish, he had to suffer
all the bodily miseries that filth, foul air, cold and vermin inflict.
The feeling evinced of late by the Court, in the prisoner’s favour,
appears now to have extended to the town; the liberal party, the native
Genevese, opposed to Calvin, making of his prosecution of the solitary
stranger a handle against him; his friends on the contrary speaking
of it as proclaiming him the undaunted defender of the cause of God
and religion! The trial we therefore see had become the occasion of
alarm to one political party in the state, of hope to another, and of
peculiar significance to both. Under present circumstances, matters
proceeding in nowise to his satisfaction, Calvin must come again to
the front; and we have it on unquestionable authority that it was at
this, the very crisis in the fate of Servetus, that the Reformer was
guilty of the crying injustice of availing himself of his pulpit,
and in the face of numerous congregations denouncing and vilifying
his opponent in no measured terms, exposing his unorthodox opinions
in their most glaring and repulsive aspects, proclaiming what he
characterised as their impious, blasphemous, demoralising nature, and
thundering reproaches on the mistaken sympathy that had lately begun
to be entertained for the author of such infamies. By right or by
wrong Calvin was resolved that his old theological enemy, now turned,
as he believed, into their tool for his humiliation by his political
opponents, should not escape him.