Melbourne Unitarian Peace Memorial Church

for Melbourne Unitarian Peace Memorial Church, 2 March 2008, by Gretchen Thomas

It is an honour to be asked to speak here today. I acknowledge and thank the original owners of the land on which we have gathered.
Michael Servetus was one of the early Reformation’s many passionate, unorthodox theologians. Because he was so persuasive in defending early Unitarian and Universalist beliefs, Servetus is widely known, even revered, by modern Unitarians. He was an unusual person living in an unusual time. This is an opportunity to learn about those exciting times and about his remarkable life-story.

Michael Servetus was born in Villanueva, Spain, in 1511, and died in Geneva, Switzerland, in 1553. Some historians say he was a priest, others say he was not. Perhaps, like Erasmus, he was a non-ordained church clerk. He definitely was a child prodigy who became a person of enormous versatility with expertise in many areas. During his 42 years, he was an author, editor, and professor. He was a geographer, mathematician, astronomer, and astrologer. He was also a pharmacist and legal expert. As well, he was a linguist, translator, theologian, biblical scholar, and (pause) a condemned heretic. Servetus’ belief in himself, his brilliance and extremism, his arrogance and obstinacy, were his strengths, and his weaknesses. They cost him his life, but they also created a lasting legacy--a legacy we modern Unitarians have inherited.

Servetus’ entire life was lived on the cusp of change. The 16th Century was a crossroads where the feudalism of medieval society, the humanism of the Renaissance, the reason of science, the backlash against the Inquisition, and rumours of riches among savages in the recently discovered "New World," all met, clashed, and caused tremendous political and religious upheaval. During Servetus’ lifetime, the hold of the Church broke open. Up to then, the Church had controlled governments, people’s fortunes, their hearts and minds. But now, the question of what could replace the Church’s authority was up for grabs.

Servetus was one of the scholars and theologians who leapt headlong into this opening, an opening though which the Protestant Reformation was emerging. Able students like Servetus could learn the previously forbidden languages of Hebrew and Aramaic, and study for themselves the original versions of the Bible, discovering how it had been translated, and uncovering how it had been changed. Servetus was an advocate of the highly controversial practice of autopsy, a new practice that held the power to move medicine from a mystery to a science. Servetus worked as an assistant to court physicians and theologians in a time when doctors and priests were preoccupied with questions about theology and the role of the Church that were as much political and scientific as they were theological.

Servetus was also a central player in a publishing explosion. One hundred years after Gutenberg invented the printing press, publishing had become the engine of the Reformation with a continent-wide market, and beyond. With a publisher’s help, an author could capture the attention of the reading world. Printer-publishers were the venture capitalists and the media moguls of the 16th Century, making huge fortunes from the books produced by their new technology. They regularly hired Servetus, because he was an eminent scholar and an excellent editor. They helped him publish his own controversial writing. After Servetus was condemned by the Spanish Inquisition, his writings were printed secretly and anonymously.

Large numbers of books and their wide distribution, meant it was no longer possible to censor printed matter that was controversial, radical, revolutionary, or heretical. The power of the Inquisition had lessened, but there were still political and financial gains to be achieved by accusing heretics. Writing books, and suppressing books, took place within this incendiary environment.

I am convinced that our interest in Michael Servetus has revived, because his voice speaks so well for our own times—these times, when discovery and manufacture of an information technology has led to an information explosion that, in turn, has led to far more families travelling to foreign countries and making sure their children learn several languages. The printing press was to the 16th Century, what the personal computer is today. We, too, see a breaking up and re-formation of our older organizations and long held borders. Power is shifting from its traditional holders to new information-brokering oligarchies. Our religious and ethnic wars are followed by trials in which individuals and nations are held to new international standards. We, too, have waked up to the urgent need for inter-faith dialogue. The world feels smaller, and its people are learning to think globally.
In 2003 most of our Unitarian congregations held services to mark the 450th anniversary of Servetus’ death. Fifty years before, on the 400th anniversary, very few such services were held. But then, 50 years ago, there was no internet.

While he was growing up in Spain, Servetus lived alongside Jewish and Islamic minority groups that were desperately fighting battles for religious and ethnic freedom. He hoped for a return to the early 14th Century period in Spain known as Convivencia, when Jews, Christians, and Muslims coexisted in relative peace. He began to defend the rights of outcasts long before he realized that he would become one himself.

The only Church Servetus knew was the highly corrupt 16th century Catholic Church. He was disgusted by the decadent opulent lives of most church leaders. Like Luther, he was deeply shocked by the Pope Leo X’s selling expensive indulgences to finance his empire, indulgences that were guaranteed by the Pope to completely remit one’s every sin, past and future. As an 18-year-old scholar’s assistant and minor member of the court, Servetus attended the coronation of Charles the 5th (the last Holy Roman Emperor) and was horrified to find that Pope Clement the 7th was worshipped as a divine being.

It was a turning point in Servetus’ life to see first-hand the corrupt Church’s flagrant display of wealth and power. He felt compelled to speak out, and at age 19 wrote his first book, On the Errors of the Trinity. The most influential books then flooding Europe were by young, outspoken authors addressing the pressing issues of the day. Servetus thought his book proved convincingly that the doctrine of the Trinity was not the word of God, but purely the creation of the Council of Nicaea. He hoped his writing would successfully undermine the entire rotten structure on which the power of Rome rested. But he could not have been more wrong. His writing infuriated the Catholic Church as well as all of the more orthodox Protestant Reformers. It caused Servetus to be condemned to death (in absentia) by the Spanish Inquisition.

Servetus escaped the Inquisition’s clutches, moved to France, changed his name, and trained in Paris for a new profession—doctor of medicine. For many years noblemen travelled great distances to consult with the learned "Dr. Villanueva." But Servetus had not given up on trying to reform the Christian churches of his time. In his early thirties, he rewrote his book as The Restoration of Christianity. He believed Christianity had been “stolen by the Church” and should be “restored” to the purity of the 4th Century Christian communities, as they existed before the Council of Nicaea.
In addition to its liberal, provocative theological assertions, The Restoration of Christianity contained the first accurate account of pulmonary circulation, but because Calvin ordered all copies of Servetus’s book burned, it was another 140 years before anyone paid attention to Servetus’ Nobel Prize-worthy discovery. What his objectors did pay attention to, was that Servetus was putting forward highly heretical ideas— ideas that conflicted strikingly with the positions of the more orthodox Reformers like Luther, Zwingli, and Calvin, ideas that would soon provide the foundation of the beliefs of Humanists in the Netherlands and Italy, and of Unitarians in Poland and Transylvania.

Five years before his last book was printed, Servetus sent parts of the manuscript to Calvin, inviting an on-going debate on their merits. Servetus argued that God was the original source and ultimate creator of all things, intangible, transcendent, and present everywhere as a positive force. Calvin’s God was vengeful and punishing, concerned with judgement, sin, and the afterlives of the chosen, and the damned. Servetus maintained the Unitarian views that the Trinity was not affirmed anywhere in the original text of the Bible and that Jesus was born a human being and his human nature prevented him from being a divine part of God. Calvin’s Jesus was definitely divine. Servetus also took the Universalist position that all human beings had the Holy Spirit dwelling within them, which meant every human being had worth and dignity. For Calvin, one joined with God only after death, and only if you were one of the fortunate who had been chosen (look up) (pre-destined before birth by God) for the ascent to heaven. Servetus argued that baptism should take place only after one had become an adult, because one must be an adult thinker to be capable of making a genuine commitment to being a Christian. (look up) (This has always been the Transylvanian Unitarians’ practice.) Calvin, on the other hand, was pleased to have parents decide for their infants that they would be Calvinist Christians. For Calvin, the world was wicked, and the wicked required discipline and punishment. Servetus rejected the hopelessness of Calvin’s view, that implied forgiveness and reform were not possible. In fact, it was Servetus’ Universalist denial of a punishing God that most infuriated Calvin and convinced him Servetus must be judged a heretic and condemned to death.
At the trial, 38 charges were brought, including what was, in some ways, the most insignificant one, “insulting Calvin.” It is important to note that Calvin needed the widely publicized trial to prop up his shaky position as the political and religious dictator of the city-state of Geneva, and he was infuriated, as the trial drug on and Servetus continually out-argued the prosecutors and judges.

History has shown that it was not protests made in defence of his writings that have made Servetus important, but rather, the protests of his unjust death, so that, today most people know Servetus more for his death at the hands of Calvin, than for the progressive theology and scientific reason he believed were important enough to die for.

It was Calvin’s intention to eradicate Servetus’ ideas along with the man. He almost succeeded. Although the punishment for owning a copy of this highly forbidden book was death, three copies survived. Lawrence and Nancy Goldstone book, Out of the Flames, (from which you heard the earlier reading) traces the fascinating histories of each of these three books. One of them saved the Transylvanian Unitarians from extinction during the Counter-Reformation. In 1784, just before the French Revolution, the Bibliothéque Royale purchased one of the other surviving copies for 4,120 livres. At the same auction Calvin’s small book, Defense of the True Faith of the Sacred Trinity against the Hideous Errors of Michael Servetus, Spaniard, was bought for 19 livres.

450 years later, we find ourselves in step with Servetus’s solutions for the ills of his times. To counteract corruption, Servetus argued for placing less authority in the hands of the Church and the Pope. To counteract the falsification of history, Servetus argued for freedom of speech and the press. He defended empirical science based on direct observation and actual experience. He contended that, “We must not impose as truths, concepts over which there are doubts.” He believed that well-reasoned argument and debate should decide political and religious concerns. Like the Unitarians in Poland and Transylvania--who soon followed and extended the paths Servetus originally laid down--he located moral responsibility within each individual.
All of these positions, assume relying on one’s own reason and conscience for authority, rather than depending upon a priest or Pope to decide for you how you should live, or what you must believe. This respect of individual moral responsibility and conscience, was a threat to every established religious institution of his era—whether Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, or Islamic. Freedom of religion, freedom of speech, and tolerance of religious and ethnic diversity, were the swords Servetus carried into the battles of the Reformation.

In his history of the development of Unitarian thought (For Faith and Freedom pp. 41-60), Charles Howe asserts that Servetus’ writings and martyrdom have given today’s Unitarians a double legacy. First, the widespread protests against Servetus’ trial and execution that grew into a passionate protest movement, led to greater religious tolerance in the 16th century and sparked the focus on tolerance that has always stood at the heart of Unitarianism. Second, these protests also strengthened the more liberal side of all the emerging Protestant groups. Howe maintains that Servetus’ writings and death “provided the crucial catalyst that initiated the Unitarian movements in Poland and Transylvania,” with their commitment to the authority of personal reason, freedom of religious choice, freedom of speech, and tolerance of neighbouring faiths.

Servetus’ trial and death were certainly a testament to courage of conscience. It became the moment in European history when other champions of justice, religious freedom, and tolerance drew a line and said, "It is wrong to silence such courage of conviction. I will not support it.” The spread of the Servetus’ ideas, marked a turning point in the intellectual discussions that eventually led to the recognition of freedom of thought and conscience as an inalienable human right. And though, in the beginning, the Reformers had no intention of being tolerant of other religions; in the end, the states and churches of a divided Europe found that they must tolerate one another or die.

I want to mention as a sidebar, Katherine Vogel, who was also burned at the stake for “refusing to recant his disbelief in the Trinity.” But all this happened before the printing press, so we know very little about her. What allowed Servetus to be known to us--what has saved him for our times--were the three copies of The Restoration of Christianity that survived and became surrogates for their author, going into hiding and relying on secret protection, until, centuries later, they could be safely read, appreciated, and acted upon. His writing kept alive Servetus’ spirit and his genius, so others (including Faustus Socinus, Francis Dávid, Voltaire, Thomas Jefferson, Joseph Priestly, John Locke, Unitarian leaders across the world, and many others) might draw inspiration from Servetus’ unsparing quest for truth. 455 years later, we are all richer for it.

In a park near the Geneva city walls, there is an impressive monument to the Reformation leaders. At its centre, are larger-than-life-sized statues of many of the Protestant Reformers. The largest and most dominant figure, is of Calvin, who glowers down on the visitors.
Out on the Plateau de Champel where Servetus was put to death, there is a memorial stone cube so hard to reach from the street, and so well hidden among untended bushes and litter, that the official Geneva tourist guide calls it "the lost monument." The words carved beneath Servetus’ name say, "Burned here" and "Spanish physician."