SERVETUS IS VISITED IN PRISON BY CALVIN AND THE MINISTERS.
We have seen symptoms of something like a leaning of the Court towards
the prisoner. They had requested Calvin and others of the Clergy to
visit and confer with him, and do their best to bring him to what
all regarded as a better understanding; and it would appear that
immediately after the last sitting, Calvin, accompanied by several
Ministers, proceeded to the gaol and had an interview with the
prisoner. Calvin of course was the spokesman, and opened upon him with
an address in which he strove to show him not only the load of error
under which he laboured in his exposition of Scripture generally, but
the grave offence he had committed in attacking the particular dogma
of the Trinity, as interpreted by the Churches, and in calling all who
believed in it Tritheists and even Atheists.
From what we already know we may divine how little a visit from John
Calvin with such an exordium was likely to lead to any satisfactory
conclusion; Servetus appears at first, indeed, to have declined even to
hear his visitors: he was too much oppressed by sorrow, sickness, and
long confinement, he said, to enter on any defence of his views, and a
prison was no fit place for theological discussion.
Stern, bigoted, and uncompromising as he was by nature, Calvin would
have been false to his calling as a Minister had he not striven, though
thus encountered, to bring even a personal enemy to what he believed
to be proper thoughts of the Trinity, the nature of the Logos and the
Sonship of Christ; and we do not question his will and inclination to
do so; but in Servetus Calvin saw the man who had insulted and so had
mortally offended him, whilst in Calvin, Servetus beheld the individual
who so lately, by underhand means and the violation of his confidential
correspondence, had wrecked his fortunes and sought his life; the man,
moreover, at whose instance he was now in prison and subjected to what
he rightfully regarded as unworthy usage and an unauthorised and unjust
trial.
We can but excuse the irritation that mastered Servetus now, and
lament that with Berthelier’s disastrous countenance misleading him,
he neglected the chance that was undoubtedly offered him to save his
life, had it been but by a show of moderation and conciliatory bearing.
Calvin, however, must have persevered for a while with the unfortunate
physician, and brought him to reply to more than one of the principles
of his system produced against him. Among others, we find him reported
as maintaining that wherever the word _Son_ is met with in the
Scriptures, it is the _man_ Jesus that is to be understood; and when
_Christ_ is spoken of as the Word and the Eternal Son, the language is
to be taken in a _potential_ not in an actual sense; neither Light,
Logos, nor Son having existed otherwise than in the mind of God before
creation; the actual or real Son in particular having only begun to
be when engendered in the womb of the Virgin Mary--and so on, the
discourse turning upon matters transcending man’s power to know, and
falling wholly within the domain of faith or belief. On the last topic
brought under review, Servetus from the beginning of his career was
always empathic. ‘Si unum iota mihi ostendas quo Verbum illud Filius
vocetur, aut de Verbi generatione fiat mentio, fatebor me devictum.
Ubi Scriptura dicit Verbum, dicit et ipse Verbum; ubi Filius, Filius;
scilicet: olim Verbum, nunc vero Filius.’ These are his words in his
earliest work, and from their tenor he never swerved.[91]
The interview ended as we may imagine it could only end--with increased
irritation on the part of the Ministers at the obstinate self-will
of the heretic, as they interpreted it, and without a ray of new
light having made its way into the mind either of the prisoner or his
visitors. His would-be enlighteners, however--he thinking that they
stood much in need of enlightenment from him--were particular, before
taking their leave, in insisting on the right of the temporal power in
the state to repress and punish theological error. Heretics, as they
said, being liable by the Justinian Code, still in force over Europe,
to be proceeded against and punished as criminals; and he having, in a
highly objectionable manner, attacked many among the most sacred of the
divine ordinances, would have no reason to complain did he find himself
dealt with in the severest fashion as a blasphemer of the Church of
God, and disturber of the peace of Christendom.
But neither, as we may imagine, were the words of the deputation in
this direction found of any avail in leading the prisoner to their
views. Civil tribunals, he maintained, were utterly incompetent in
matters of faith, and had no right of the sword in cases of imputed
heresy. The Code of Justinian was in truth no authority, having
been compiled in times when the Church had already lapsed from its
original purity. The violent repressive measures it sanctioned were
wholly unknown to the Apostles and their immediate successors. Besides
all this, he held the Church of Geneva to be specially precluded
from giving an opinion or pronouncing a judgment upon his views;
his opponent and personal enemy, Calvin, wielding such paramount
authority there, as to make him in fact and in himself the Church.
How little all this, however true (and all the less, perhaps, because
true), was calculated to win either Calvin or his followers to more
friendly feelings, may be imagined; but it shows us the brave,
consistent, conscientious, religious man, face to face with fate, and
a proffered opportunity to conciliate and save his life, abiding by
his convictions, and, with the warning but just given him, rather than
belie himself, verily courting death. What would have happened had
Galileo been as conscientious and firm as Servetus?