THE ATTITUDE OF CALVIN--THE HOPES OF SERVETUS.
Informed of the decree of the Court, Calvin tells us that he bestirred
himself to have the sentence carried out in the way usual in criminal
cases, by beheading with the sword, instead of burning by slow fire.
The heretic must be got rid of, he must die, but the Reformer would
give a civil rather than an ecclesiastical complexion to the business,
and escape imitation of the Roman Catholic cruel mode of putting God’s
enemies, as heretics were called, to death. The Council, however, did
not enter into his views. The Canon Law, still in force over Europe,
condemned the convicted heretic to death by fire, and the majority of
the Court determined to abide by the statute as it stood. Bigotry and
intolerance, fanned to fever heat, were in the ascendant, and would
forego none of their most terrible means of punishing the offender,
and striking terror into the vulgar mind. The oblation in such cases
provided, would even have appeared to lose its significance, had it
been presented otherwise than as ‘a sacrifice of a sweet savour made by
fire to the Lord’; for still influenced by the ritual of the old Hebrew
Law, which, in earlier days, required the first-born of man and beast
for the altar, and had criminals of all sorts ‘hung up before the sun,’
lives forfeited for theological errors, were, in reality, offerings to
appease the wrath or win the favour of the Supreme!
Servetus, meanwhile, made aware that the trial was at an end, and that
nothing more remained for him but to learn his fate, though he may have
been alarmed by the additional measures taken for his safe custody,
seems not yet, as we have said, to have abandoned the persuasion that
he would either be acquitted or subjected to some minor or merely
nominal penalty. He was not conscience-stricken; he knew himself
guilty of no impiety or intentional blasphemy; his object from first
to last had been to present what he thought were higher, truer views
of the Revelation which he believed God had made of himself to mankind
in the olden time in Judæa; and the proclaimed purpose of his latest
work, as he said himself to his Judges, was the _Restoration_, not
the destruction of Christianity. More than this: he was not now among
Papists bound to intolerance by their creed, but among Protestants
in Geneva--the stronghold of free thought and its necessary logical
adjunct, toleration; among men who had studied, reasoned, and, like
himself, put their own construction on writings which he as well as
they believed to be the Word of God. And then, had he not all along
been upheld by Perrin and Berthelier, in the belief of triumphing
over his persecutor? How should hopes of longer life in view of
further effort in the cause that was dear to him, and of freedom to
shape out thoughts on matters high and holy, have forsaken him? True,
Calvin had aimed at his life through the people of Vienne; and in his
present bonds, and all the unworthy usage he suffered, he could not
fail to realise the persistent hostility of the man who held him in
such despite. Still he was in Geneva, though a prisoner, and Calvin
was not all in all within that Republican city. There was a powerful
party opposed to the tyranny and self-assertion of the ecclesiastic,
the distinguished heads of which gave him their countenance and
support--there seemed hardly room for doubt: he would not be found
guilty of having blasphemed, but would be acquitted and set at liberty.
Cherishing such hopes and so supported, are we to wonder that the
Sentence of Death took the unhappy Servetus entirely by surprise?
Only imparted to him in the early morning of the day on which he was
doomed to die, he was at first as if struck dumb by the intelligence.
He did but groan aloud and sigh as if his heart would burst; and when
he recovered speech at length, it was only to rave like one demented,
to strike his breast, and cry in his native Spanish, Misericordia,
Misericordia! By degrees, however, he recovered his self-possession and
became more calm. Master of himself, and reverting in thought to his
pursuer, his first coherent words were to request an interview with
Calvin, which he, we need not doubt, was nowise slow to grant, for he
must have thought it both a flattering and a hopeful proposal. Now had
the sinner come to his senses; now would he make a clean breast of it,
abjure the convictions of his life, and with a lie on his lips be made
meet for glory! But nothing of all this was in the mind of Servetus. He
had no misgivings about his theological conclusions; in these he was
securely anchored; but he felt like a true man in the face of impending
fate, and would own that he had not comported himself with all the
respect that was rightfully due to his theological opponent. Hence his
request for the interview.
Accompanied by two of the Councillors, Calvin entered the prison an
hour or two before noon of the fateful October 27, 1553, and prefacing
the account he has left us of what transpired at the meeting, by saying
that Servetus had received the notice of his sentence and impending
doom with a ‘sort of brutish stupidity--_cum belluina stupiditate_,’
he proceeds: ‘I asked him what he wanted with me--_quidnam vellet?_
To which he replied, that he desired to ask my pardon.’ I then said
that I had never prosecuted anyone on merely personal grounds; that I
had admonished him with all the gentleness I could command as many as
sixteen years ago, and not without danger to my own life had spared no
pains to cure him of his errors. But all in vain! my expostulations
appeared rather to excite his bile. Quitting speech of myself, however,
I then desired him rather to ask pardon of the Eternal God, towards
whom he had shown himself but too contumelious, presuming, as he had
done, to take from his Essence the three hypostases that pertain to it;
and saying that were it possible to show a personal distinction between
the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, we should have a three-headed Cerberus
for a God; with much beside that need not now be repeated. Seeing,
ere long, that all I said went for nothing, and feeling indisposed to
trespass on the time of the Magistrates, or to appear something more
than my Master, in obedience to the precept of Paul, I took my leave of
the heretic, αὐτοκατάκριτος--self-condemned.[99]
But there is a deep-lying truth in the French adage: ‘Qui s’excuse
s’accuse--_he who excuses accuses himself_.’ The first impulse of
the tolerant Servetus, on coming to his senses, was to ask pardon of
the man who had brought him to his death; the first impulse of the
implacable Calvin was to apologise for his deed, and to shift to a
sense of public duty, a course to which his secret soul informed him
he had been mainly prompted by private hate. Nor is that which Calvin
connects with his apology, when he speaks of having imperilled his
life for Servetus’s sake, to be received as true in fact. That he
would have braved any danger that might have accompanied the public
discussion of their opinions proposed by Servetus in 1534, we can well
believe; but he was not required to face it, and all their subsequent
correspondence, private and confidential as it was, could have been
attended with peril neither to him nor Servetus--or if to either it
must have been to Servetus had he been discovered in correspondence
with the arch-heretic of Geneva. We can hardly imagine Calvin to have
been so totally devoid of humanity as to have felt no compunctious
visitings when he stood face to face with the man whom his persistent
enmity alone had brought to such a pass; but he would also have been
other than he meets us in history, and otherwise circumstanced than he
was as αὐτοκράτωρ--despot of Geneva--had he not felt something
of self-gratulation and even of triumph, when pardon was asked of him
by his humbled foe.