First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis

Rev. Kendyl Gibbons
First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis
October 26, 2003

Let me ask you something. How many of the people here today have an e-mail address? Can I see a show of hands? How many of you have ever used the World Wide Web, to find information, or buy something? Now think back just ten years, before the turn of the millennium, to the year 1993. How many had an e-mail address in that year? How many of you had even heard of something called the world wide web? My friends, in the past decade, you and I have lived through a nodal moment in the history of the world. In ways that have seemed as natural and intuitive as they were revolutionary, the structure of human culture has been transformed, right before our eyes. The very meaning of communication has shifted, and our access to information has increased so exponentially as to change the nature of knowledge. The capacity to share ideas, absolutely unlimited by geographical proximity or wealth, is coming to be a foundational concept of human society around the globe. All of the fifteen year olds in this congregation, and most of them in this nation, take that ability for granted; they have known no other world. This transition is breath-taking, both in the speed of its accomplishment, and the breadth of its implications.

It is perhaps worth taking a moment to catch our breath, and to reflect on the magnitude of a change that I suspect we do not even begin to comprehend fully. The inventions of the telegraph and telephone, revolutionary as each of them was in its own way, generally just made easier communication among people who were already in touch with each other anyway. There is only one historical parallel to the extent of transformation that we have been experiencing; it unfolded at the beginning of the 16^th century, fueled by the genius of two men, one of whose name you probably know, and the other of whom, unless you are a knowledgeable book collector, you have probably never heard. Michael Servetus, in many ways the intellectual founder of our religious heritage, might well have lived in obscurity and been thoroughly forgotten, if not for the accident of his being born just at this momentous time. And if not for the work of these two men and their impact on the intellectual history of western Europe, Michael Servetus might also have died of comfortable old age.

We all probably know the name of Johannes Gutenberg, the German goldsmith who is credited with the practical invention of modern printing. Utilizing his creative solutions to the technical challenges of movable type, printers all over Europe after 1455 began mass producing what had previously been available only as painstakingly hand scriven volumes. So precious were books in the preceding centuries that they were rarely moved, and were generally of large size to accommodate the scale of hand lettering. Early printed books replicated these dimensions, and often were still hand finished with illustrations and illuminated capitals. They were destined for churches, universities, and the private libraries of the extremely wealthy; no one thought they needed to be portable. Printers used paper of a standard size that measured 32 by 21 inches; folded in half, giving four printed pages to the sheet, it produced what was called a 'folio'; a book that measured 21 by 16 inches. The smaller version, called a 'quarto', folded the paper one more time, to create eight pages, and a still imposing volume that measured 16 by 10 inches. Anything smaller would be irritating to read, because the size of the available fonts would result in too few words per page, and the whole text would be impractically thick. But in the year 1500, a scholarly printer with a humanist bent by the name of Aldus Manutius completed the printing revolution. Using a smaller italic typeface, he produced the works of Virgil in an 'octavo' edition, folding the paper three times, to give sixteen pages of a tolerably thin 5 by 8 inch book. These volumes, without illustrations or illuminations, were both portable and affordable, and the new format swept the European printing industry. It was the introduction of the octavo format, as much or more than the process of printing itself, that entirely revolutionized intellectual history and western culture. The Goldstones put it this way:

It was into this culture of intellectual, political, and religious ferment that the genius Miguel Serveto was born in Huesca, Spain, in 1511. It is easy to aggrandize our heroes in retrospect, but it seems clear that both as child and man, Miguel's intellectual powers were extraordinary. By the time he was thirteen, he could read French, Greek, Latin, and even Hebrew (the study of which was forbidden by the Catholic church) as well as his native Spanish. Recognizing the extent of his son's intellectual abilities, and the relative narrowness of academic resources in his home town, Anthon Serveto sent Miguel at age thirteen to the university of Zaragossa in Sienna. There he came to the attention of the most educated and progressive member of the faculty, an admirer of the humanist scholar Erasmus, named Juan de Quintana. Quintana, also recognizing the teenager's academic potential, made Miguel his personal secretary, and began to educate him not only through the standard university courses, but through private instruction in the classic and humanist texts of his own library, including a printed volume of the Ninety Five Theses that the German monk, Martin Luther, had nailed to the cathedral door in 1517. Even a generation earlier, it is likely that Luther's proposals for debate against the church's peddling of indulgences would have remained an issue local to Wittenberg, but because an enterprising printer had them translated from Latin and published, they became best sellers across Germany, and Luther an author in demand. Too late did the Vatican take the phenomenon seriously, and seek to ban the books and silence the monk. A whole new intellectual ecology was at work, but few were those who understood its profound alteration of the cultural and religious landscape.

By the time young Miguel had turned sixteen, his father was pushing for him to attend the renowned law school at the University of Toulouse in France, which his patron Quintana granted him a two year leave of absence to do. While there, he encountered for the first time published editions of the Bible's original Greek, Hebrew, and Latin texts, and concluded as many other scholars before and since, that the authority of Roman Catholicism had long provided corrupt translations and interpretations of Biblical truth. He also, at the age of seventeen, mastered Arabic, so that he might read the Qu'ran in its original language. Returning to the service of his patron in 1529, having latinized his name in the fashion of contemporary humanist scholars, Michael Servetus found that Juan de Quintana had risen to the prominent position of confessor and counselor to the soon to be emperor, Charles V. As part of Quintana's staff, Sevetus, by then just eighteen, was invited to Charles's coronation by the Pope in February of 1530. The ostentatious opulence of this event seemed to the idealistic young student to symbolize everything he had come to believe about the corruption, hypocrisy, and profligacy of the established church. He would later write an often quoted passage describing his revulsion at the spectacle:

With total confidence in both the correctness of his opinions, and his intellectual prowess to defend them, Servetus did not intend to remain in the backwaters of Spain, in the service of a man who served the emperor. He would seek out the heart of the Reformation, and within that movement pursue the restoration of Christianity as he believed it was taught in the scriptures, and as God had intended it to be. First to Basel, and then to Strasbourg, he carried his arguments to now forgotten minor Reformation leaders, but none of them seemed to grasp his insight that the central problem in the corruption of Christianity was the absurd and unscriptural doctrine of the trinity. Simply dispense with this notion, said Servetus, that God was at once singular and also three unique persons - a notion foisted on the church by the politics of the Emperor Constantine at the Council of Nicea - and pretty much everything else would fall back into its proper place. And in fact some of the Reformation thinkers had hesitated over the concept of the trinity, but none of them was quite secure enough to take on that idea, for so long the lynch pin of the belief in a divine savior's atonement to a just God for the sins of humanity. After a year and a half of frustration, trying to get individuals on a one to one basis to agree with his proposals for eliminating the doctrine of the trinity, Servetus came to the conclusion that his cause would be better served by using the new technology; he would publish his arguments in a book that anyone, or everyone, could read. And so, in 1531, at barely twenty years of age, in all the arrogance of privileged prodigy and all the earnestness of adolescent devotion to both God and truth, Michael Servetus quickly penned the volume that he pugnaciously entitled "On the Errors of the Trinity." His thesis was argued brilliantly but without humility. The Goldmans observe:

The printer, Johann Setzer, was eager enough to publish this manuscript, because the market was always good for shockingly heretical texts, and such a book could be expected to sell very well. On the other hand, he did not want his name connected with it, and he left the book without a publisher's identifying imprint. As anticipated, it was an immediate best seller, and Servetus was rather naievely thrilled. He sent copies to the humanist scholar Erasmus, and to Martin Luther, and to some of his old teachers in Zaragossa. Not that it wouldn't have reached them anyway, but this was a tactical error that seemed to bespeak his impudence, and the young author was promptly sentenced to death in absentia by the Spanish Inquisition. The Protestant leaders, backed into a corner by the necessity either to agree with Servetus or denounce him, took the more conventional position and came to the defense of the doctrine of the trinity. With both sides closing in on him, it seemed only a matter of short time before Servetus would be in jail for heresy, either at the hands of the Reformation or the Inquisition. But then, astonishingly for both sides, he simply vanished, and was not heard of again for fifteen years.

In 1546, John Calvin, the reforming leader of the city of Geneva, received a letter from an old acquaintance from his college days in Paris, one whom he had known first as Michael Villenovanus, and who had turned out to be that heretical author, Michael Servetus. The letter, a politely worded request for Calvin to explain certain issues of Christian faith, felt like, and was, a set up. Servetus wanted to renew the debates in which they had engaged during their student days, debates in which Calvin had almost always come off notably the worse. Calvin replied brusquely, saying he had better things to do these days than enter into such arguments, but Servetus would not leave him alone. Ultimately, Calvin sent along a copy of his own book of social and doctrinal principles, "Institutes of the Christian Religion," instructing his tormentor to find the answers to his questions there. Instead, Servetus, who had been supporting himself in the interim by, among other things, copy editing, returned the volume with its margins filled with critical comments. Along with this was the offer that if Calvin would assure his safety, Servetus would come to Geneva in person, so that they could resolve the issues, including that of the trinity, in a face to face debate. Calvin had nothing to gain in such a debate, and he had no intention of promising the heretic a safe conduct. He wrote in a letter to a friend in February of 1546, "Servetus desires to come hither, on my invitation; but I will not plight my faith to him; for I have determined, did he come, that I would never suffer him to go away alive." As part of the correspondence, Servetus also sent a copy of the manuscript of a new book he was working on, apparently hoping that it would prove persuasive. When Calvin responded that he lacked time to write an adequate reply, Servetus asked for the manuscript back, but Calvin had no motivation to return it. And when Servetus considered the book ready for publication six years later, in 1552, he included as a sort of preface, the text of the thirty letters he had in the meantime written to Calvin. Thus although the title page of the thousand octavo volumes of this work eventually published contained neither the name of the writer nor that of the printer, their authorship was obvious to anyone passingly familiar with the intellectual theological scene of the day - and in those days, theology could be literally a matter of life and death.

Entitled "The Restitution of Christianity", this second of Servetus's theological dissertations was a more mature and carefully argued presentation of his ideas, but it was not much less demeaning of those who might disagree than "Errors of the Trinity" had been. When a shipment of the books arrived in Geneva, Calvin had a copy in his hands and had banned its sale before it could even be presented to the public. But more than the need to protect the citizens of Geneva from these blasphemous ideas, Calvin saw his opportunity with this new evidence of heresy finally to force the hand of the French government, and dispose of Servetus for good. Removing the first segment of sixteen pages from his copy of the book for evidence, Calvin instructed one of his subordinates to send them to the authorities in France, castigating the French Inquisition for being so lax as to allow a proven heretic to work unmolested in their midst. After some dithering on the part of the ecclesiastical hierarchy in France, Servetus was arrested on April 4, 1553 and held in rather gentle confinement in the province of Lyon while the case was investigated. Seeing that the evidence provided against him, including some of the letters in his own handwriting forwarded by Calvin and identical to those published in "The Restitution," was fairly conclusive, Servetus had his valet bring him such money and valuables as he could put hands on, and slipped over the prison wall.

Servetus had a secure destination, and plenty of money to get to Naples, where a community of liberal Spanish intellectuals was prepared to welcome and protect him. Yet in a decision inexplicable to historians, the fugitive chose an escape route which took him through the very town of Geneva, where he arrived on Saturday, August 12, and remained overnight at an inn. It is hard to believe that anyone as brilliant as this man arrived in that town on that day purely by accident; it is difficult to credit that someone who had previously been able to vanish from sight and break out of prison found himself with no choice but to comply with the city ordinance which mandated that everyone in Geneva, citizen or visitor, must attend church on Sunday. Certainly there were churches other than the one where Calvin himself would be preaching that morning, but the reality is that Servetus, made conspicuous by his Spanish complexion in the Swiss congregation, was recognized at the church of the Madeleine, promptly arrested, and thrown in prison. Throughout the rest of the month of August, various charges against him were presented and argued before the Council of Geneva, sometimes by appointed prosecutors, sometimes by Calvin himself. Throughout this time, when not in court Servetus was confined to a dark, vermin and lice-infested cell with no sanitary facilities, and provided with scant food and no change of clothing. At one point the judges, having confiscated his money and property, granted him the use of a pen and a single sheet of paper for the purpose of preparing his defense. Meanwhile, Calvin had agreed, as a show of fair-mindedness to the ministers of the Geneva Council, that the Councils of other reform-led cities should be consulted as to what was to be done about the case, and this led to a grinding slowness in the process of the trial. By the early days of September, Servetus, provided at last with a sufficient supply of paper, had composed in elegant Latin a lucidly reasoned, scholarly and scripturally supported series of responses to the charges presented against him. Unfortunately, it was also larded with personal barbs, insults and name-calling directed at Calvin, which did nothing to cultivate the sympathy of his judges. In reality, however, nothing he could have done would have roused any sympathy for his predicament, and by late October the answers had been received from the four other Councils, universally recommending that Servetus be permanently stopped from further spreading of his abominable heresies. None of them explicitly mentioned execution, but the implication was clear, and Calvin had no hesitation. Four hundred and fifty years ago today, at the behest of its leader, the Council of Geneva unanimously ruled that "We condemn you, Michael Servetus, to be bound and taken to Champel and there attached to a stake and burned with your book to ashes."

The next day the sentence was carried out, and though he pleaded for a quicker and more merciful death, lest in the agony of burning he might lose self control and deny his true beliefs, Servetus was seated and chained amidst a pile of green wood, where it took him half an hour to die in the flames.

Several historical ironies have followed from this both tragic and heroic event. The first is that although Calvin took some pains to try to track down and destroy all copies of "The Restitution of Christianity," Servetus's later book, one of the three volumes known to be still in existence today is Calvin's, with the first signature of sixteen pages removed. The heretical work lived on through his own library. The second irony is that even though he so carefully sought the endorsement of other governments for his action, Calvin came to be widely reviled throughout Europe for having executed Servetus. The Catholics of the Inquisition were able to point out that they were no more oppressive than the reformers. Other Protestants began to distance themselves from Calvin, and one scholar, Sebastian Castellio, published a runaway best seller entitled "Concerning Heretics, Whether They Are To Be Persecuted, and How They Are To Be Treated," which consisted of a collection of letters and essays by prominent religious thinkers of the time, condemning both the execution and its brutality.

One last and perhaps the greatest irony. During the fifteen years that he dropped out of sight as Michael Servetus, a certain Michael Villenovanus turned his brilliance to the study and practice of medicine - as well as mathematics, geography, and copy editing. In an aside contained in chapter five of "The Restitution," there is an audacious claim - the man was nothing if not consistently audacious - that blood is pumped from the heart through the lungs where it is "mixed with inspired air and through expiration...cleansed of its sooty vapors," and then distributed throughout the body. This is the first accurate description of pulmonary circulation, and it would be another seventy five years before William Harvey would revolutionize western medicine with the same observation. The modern search for still extant copies of Michael Servetus's burned book would be launched not by theologians or religious scholars, but by medical historians seeking to verify that obscure passage, completely unnoticed by those who once tried to eradicate the man and his ideas.

In their prologue to "Out of the Flames," Lawrence and Nancy Goldstone write:

And in the end, it was not only Servetus's prescient insight into human anatomy that survived; so did his theological conviction that the doctrine of the trinity was a questionable, unscriptural concept, and that what is most holy demands of us not blind obedience to authority, but that we have the courage of our intellectual convictions, even courage unto death. I think of him sometimes, when I click the little symbol on my computer that says 'check mail'; I think of him composing Latin phrases in a filthy prison cell, or chained amidst the torturing flames, where he would almost certainly never have been if it hadn't been for that innovation of the printing press. I think of him, and I wonder what kinds of courage and sacrifice may be required of us, in the brave new world into which we have just begun to enter with this century. I think of Michael Servetus, my spiritual ancestor, and I gather my courage about me, and aspire, 450 years later, to be his worthy heir.