THE TRIAL IN ITS FIRST PHASE.

Formally installed in the Court of Criminal Judicature, Nicolas de la Fontaine and Michael Servetus were ordered to be brought before them by the Judges; and the prosecutor declaring that he persisted in his allegations, and the prisoner being put on his oath to speak the truth under penalties to the extent of 60 sols, the Trial commenced.

To the question as to his name and condition, the prisoner replied that his name was Michael Serveto, of Villanova, in the kingdom of Aragon, in Spain, and that by profession he was a physician. The articles of impeachment already produced were then restated seriatim, and to each he was required to answer categorically. This he did, and generally in the terms he had used in his preliminary examination, but accusing Calvin, and Calvin alone, more imperatively than before, of having provoked his arrest and prosecution at Vienne, adding that had Calvin had his way, he—the prisoner—would assuredly have been burned alive. To all that had reference to the Doctrine of the Trinity, the Nature of Christ, the relations between God and created things, he spoke as he had already done. He again and pointedly denied that he had ever said the soul was mortal; but admitted having written that he thinks man commits no mortal sin before the age of twenty years, adding that ‘under the Law God had so ordered it.’ The Baptism of Infants he acknowledged to be in his eyes a diabolical invention, and calculated to corrupt the whole of Christianity; declaring however, as formerly, that if it were shown he erred in this opinion he was ready to retract and amend.

As to the alleged attacks on the Church of Geneva through the person of Calvin, he answered as before, and now added that all he had written against Calvin was with no view or desire to calumniate or injure him, but only to show him his errors; and he now offers in open congregation to make good his words by a variety of reasons, and the authority of the Scriptures.

This was to throw down the gauntlet to Calvin and offer him battle on ground he could not decline, since he too acknowledged no authority but holy writ, and we need not doubt of his readiness to take up the pledge: there was nothing indeed, as he declared, for he was present in Court watching the proceedings, that he desired more than to show himself in such a cause before all the world.74 The Court may be excused for having imagined that in agreeing to such a wordy duel between Calvin and Servetus they would be letting the question slip out of their proper hands; or, as M. Albert Rilliet75 suggests, the friends whom Servetus had among its members, measuring the mental calibre of the two men, may have feared to see him they favoured worsted by his redoubtable opponent, whose dialectical skill and theological lore were so well known to all. Deciding against the proposal of the prisoner, therefore, the tribunal determined that the trial should proceed in the usual way.

So far as they had gone we can readily conceive that the answers of Servetus must have seemed little satisfactory to the Court. On even a large proportion of the allegations made, they may have felt their incompetency to form an opinion; but upon a few they believed themselves fully able to come to a conclusion. What he had said on Infant Baptism in particular was greatly calculated to prejudice him in the minds of his Judges; the doctrine he held being one among the dangerous moral, social, and political principles of the Anabaptists, though the whole of these were emphatically disavowed and condemned by Servetus, who really appears to have had nothing in common with the dreaded sect but the opinion that Baptism should not be performed until years of discretion were attained, and that the rite should be solemnised by immersion or affusion, not by merely sprinkling the face with water.

The decision of the Court at the end of the day’s proceedings was to the effect that, as the answers of the prisoner Michael Servetus implied criminality, the trial should go on; but that the prosecutor, Nicolas de la Fontaine, whilst bound over to continue the suit, might be released on the production of sufficient bail; and this being immediately forthcoming in the person of Monsieur Antoine Calvin, brother of the Reformer, Calvin’s substitute and Chef de Cuisine was discharged from custody, whilst Servetus was remanded to gaol. Thus formally constituted prisoner on a criminal charge, Servetus now delivered to the gaoler all the money and valuables he possessed, the coin amounting to ninety-seven gold crowns, the valuables being a gold chain of the value of twenty crowns, and as many as seven gold rings set with a table diamond, a ruby and other stones of price.

August 16, the Court, constituted as usual, was observed to be less numerously attended than on the day before, but with two important additions: Philibert Berthelier among the Councillors, by right, and Germain Colladon, introduced as Counsel for De la Fontaine. Between these two men, says M. Rilliet, more perhaps than between any other notable members of the Republic of Geneva, the contrast was striking and complete. They might even severally have been assumed as representatives of the parties which divided the state and contended for mastery. Berthelier was the acknowledged head of the patriotic party, mostly native Genevese, the Libertines as they were called, from their zealous defence of the immunities and privileges of the citizens against the old tyranny of the Roman Catholic Bishops and the recently introduced consistorial rules and regulations of the Reformer. As son of one of the martyrs to the public liberties of Geneva, and possessed of wealth and influence, Berthelier had long been opposed to the authority of Calvin; his patriotism and his self-respect revolting against the domineering character of the man and the stringency of his religious and sumptuary regulations, so that the struggle in which he and Colladon now engaged, with the unhappy Servetus as their subject of contention, was but an interlude in the strife that had been carried on between Berthelier and Calvin for years.

In Calvin’s arrest and prosecution of Servetus there can be no question that Berthelier, making light of the theological grounds on which the Spaniard was arraigned, and trusting to the strength of his party in the Council, believed he saw a means and opportunity of worsting his old irreconcilable enemy. He thought little, and it may be perhaps felt somewhat indifferent as to the fate that would befal the individual whose cause he espoused, did he fail in the purpose he proposed to himself. Hate of Calvin blinded him to more remote contingencies.

Colladon, engaged of course by Calvin on behalf of Nicolas de la Fontaine and the prosecution, was a man of a totally different stamp from Berthelier. A refugee from France, his native country, for conscience sake, and seeking in Geneva freedom to enjoy his religious convictions; austere in disposition, rigid in morals and punctilious in outward observance, he had been forced to fly from his home in consequence of zeal too openly expressed for the cause of the Reformation. Safe in Geneva, he gave himself heart and soul to Calvin, and was found by him among the most useful of his auxiliaries in formulating his discipline and enforcing its observance, Colladon’s familiarity with business and his legal knowledge qualifying him in every way for the part he was ambitious to play. The party of which he was a distinguished member were now in the minority, but did not so remain for long. Within two years of the time that engages us, they had gained the ascendency, and were not slow to avenge themselves on the legitimate sons of Geneva by forcing them in numbers into banishment, and filling their places by naturalising the French and Italian refugees, who continued pouring into Geneva in crowds, to escape the persecution that then raged in their native countries.

The fiery dispute in which Berthelier and Colladon engaged at this day’s sitting, seems to have concerned Calvin much more than Servetus, its ostensible subject: the French Reformer of Christianity far more than its would-be Spanish Restorer, was the true object of the attack and defence. The debate in the old episcopal palace, in a word, was between the representatives of the two factions that contended for supremacy in Geneva.

We have unfortunately no complete account of what transpired on this the first encounter between Berthelier and Colladon. The Records of the Criminal Court are significantly silent on the subject; but that it was violent there can be no question, so violent that the morning sitting had to be suspended before the usual hour of rising. Yet are we at no loss to divine the ground on which the presumed altercation arose, when we note the point where the blank in the proceedings occurs, coming as it does in immediate connection with the articles having reference to the subject of the Trinity. Servetus, in the course of the interrogatory to which he was subjected, having replied equivocally or unsatisfactorily as to the sense in which the word person is to be understood in speaking of the Trinitarian Mystery, Colladon must have contended that he could show by various passages of the printed book before the Court, that the prisoner now spoke otherwise of the Trinity than he really believed, and proceeded to handle him somewhat sharply, in the way Counsel learned in the Law are still wont to treat those they have under cross-examination; somewhat unfairly, too, as Berthelier may have thought, so that he interposed, and must even have said something not only in defence of the prisoner, but of the opinions incriminated. And here it was, and in consequence of the warmth of the debate, that the proceedings had to be suspended.

Before breaking up, a number of books, which had been produced by the Counsel for the prosecution in support of his case, were directed to be left with the clerk of the Court; and each party in the suit, having noted its case, was ordered to be in readiness to go on at the next sitting. The books in question were the works of Melanchthon and the letters of Œcolampadius, the Geography of Ptolemy, and the Bible of Pagnini; the two last of which the prisoner owned to having edited and annotated. The most important of all, however, was the ‘Christianismi Restitutio,’ upon the interpretation of some of the passages of which, in contrast with the present replies of the prisoner, arose the altercation that led to the momentary suspension of the proceedings.

From the Registers of the Grand Council we learn that on the morrow of the stormy session of the sixteenth, Calvin presented himself before the Council and demanded an audience. He had learned, he said, that Philibert Berthelier had meddled in the suit against Michael Servetus, and even spoken in defence of some of the incriminated passages of the prisoner’s book—a mortal offence in Calvin’s eyes, and an indication, not to be mistaken, of hostility to himself as virtual pursuer of the obnoxious heretic. The time had come, in fact, when, throwing aside disguise, Calvin must come from behind Nicolas de la Fontaine, avow himself the prosecutor, and nip in the bud, if he could, the new growth of rebellion against his rule for which Servetus, he saw, was now to be made the pretext.

In the interference of Berthelier, which we see must have given such umbrage to Calvin, we have the first open indication by the Libertine party of their sympathy with the prisoner; sympathy, real or pretended, that may be said to have sealed the fate of the unhappy Servetus; for the issue, though continuing to be debated on the ground of speculative theology, on which so many questions might be raised and doubts entertained, was henceforth to a certain extent transferred to the domain of politics, on which there was the one practical issue involved, as to who or which party that divided the state of Geneva should have the upper hand.

It may be fairly presumed that Calvin, with the great advantage he had in natural talent and acquirements, had no difficulty in satisfying the majority of the Judges of the culpability of Servetus on theological grounds; his opinions differed too obviously from all they had ever been led to believe concerning the Trinity and Infant Baptism, especially, to leave them in any doubt as to this. Servetus differed, in fact, on every point brought forward, from the doctrine familiar to the mind of Geneva—enough of itself to lay him under suspicion; and, accepting Calvin’s interpretation of the incriminated passages of his book, which his Judges must have felt bound in some sort to do, they could have had nothing for it, had the prosecution now insisted on having made out their case, but to proceed to judgment, and pronounce the prisoner guilty. But this was not done; the Judges appear not only to have felt no kind of hostility towards the solitary stranger in the singular and painful position in which he stood, but even to have been moved to something like compassion in his behalf.

After the suspension of the early sitting of the 16th in consequence of the stormy scene between Berthelier and Colladon, and a pause to permit the minds of all to regain a state of calm befitting the circumstances, proceedings of an informal kind only were taken later in the day. These are interesting, nevertheless, because of the recommendation of the Judges to Calvin in sequence to his avowal of himself as virtual prosecutor, to use every fair endeavour to bring the prisoner to what were thought to be better views, as well as to furnish the Court with further and more satisfactory evidence of his heretical guiltiness. To this end Calvin was requested by the Court to visit the prisoner, ‘the better to show him his errors—affin que myeux luy puyssent estre remonstrÉes ses erreurs: to assist him, À assister luy, and to do what he could with him in respect of the interrogatories put to him, et qu’il vouldra avec luy aux interrogatoires. This surely is both interesting and important. The Court would have spared the man, and given him an opportunity of coming to an understanding with the prosecutor on the difficult matters in debate between them. We shall accordingly find by-and-by that Calvin, accompanied by a number of ministers, in compliance with the benevolent intentions of the Court, paid Servetus a visit in prison; but with results that might have been foreseen—not only not advantageous to him, but damaging in the highest degree to his interests.

On the resumption of proceedings next day, August 17, Calvin took his seat on the Bench, and under him, in the area, were seen a number of ministers, his colleagues, specially introduced, as said, to show the prisoner his errors, but all, like their leader, we fear, rather bent on convicting the dangerous heretic than hopeful of convincing and winning over the mistaken theologian.

Colladon, as counsel for the prosecution, now went on with his interrogatories as at the last meeting; and various particulars which had hitherto remained in the shade were brought prominently forward. Among others it was positively averred that the prisoner had been tried and condemned in Germany, a point only hinted at before; and passages from private letters by Melanchthon and Œcolampadius were quoted in support of the allegation. In these the severest censure is certainly passed on the views of the prisoner; but, as he observed, the adverse opinions of the Reformers referred to by no means implied that he had ever been the subject of any judicial trial or condemnation in Germany; a remark for which Colladon had no better rejoinder than to say that had he and his printer been apprehended and tried, they would undoubtedly have been condemned.

Questioned as to who was the printer of his book on ‘Trinitarian Error,’ he said it was Joannes Secerius of Hagenau. On this, Colladon went on to say that the book was full of heretical poison, and that it was impossible it should not have infected many persons. But there was no evidence adduced to show that it had; and it is not unimportant to observe that Colladon’s statements here are based on a document which is not before the Court, a copy of the book on ‘Trinitarian Error,’ though eagerly sought after, as we have seen, not being anywhere to be found.

On the note or scholium in the Ptolemy, calling in question the truth of the Bible account of JudÆa as a land flowing with milk and honey, on which he was challenged, Servetus declared that it was not by him, but quoted from another writer, adding incautiously, from himself, however, that the note contained nothing reprehensible or that was not true. This aroused the ire of Calvin, who now interposed, not certainly in agreement with the recommendation of the Court to show the prisoner that he had been led into error through false information, as he might have done, but to declare that he who approved the words of another characterising JudÆa as no land flowing with milk and honey, but as meagre, barren, and inhospitable, necessarily inculpated Moses; and that to use such language was egregiously to outrage the Holy Ghost.

Servetus, however, would not agree to this, coolly denying any such conclusion; insomuch so, as Calvin himself tells us, in no very choice terms, that ‘the villainous cur—ce vilain chien—though put to shame by the obvious reasons adduced, did but wipe his muzzle, ne fit que torcher son museau, and say: Let us go on, there is no harm here—passons oultre, il n’y a poynt lÀ de mal’.76

Another important article of the impeachment brought into prominence in this day’s proceedings was from among the prisoner’s annotations to the reprint of Santes Pagnini’s Bible, which he supervised, as we know, for Hugo de la Porte, the publisher of Lyons. This Bible was said by the prosecution to be encumbered with many glosses or comments totally opposed to the Faith; the one most notably so of all perhaps being appended to the thirty-third chapter of Isaiah, where the servant of God who took on himself the sins of the people is spoken of by the Prophet. ‘This passage,’ said Calvin, ‘is referred by the prisoner to Cyrus, whilst every Christian Church refers it to Jesus Christ.’ But Servetus was again bold enough to maintain his position in so far as to say that the interpretation he had given of the passage was borne out in some sort by the opinions of the old Doctors of the Church, who acknowledged, as he said, a twofold sense in the Scriptures—one, literal and historical, applying to contemporaneous personages and events; another, mystical and prophetic, bearing on Christ and the future. ‘In speaking of the individual referred to, as he had done, and calling him Cyrus, he said that he nevertheless held the prophetical and most important bearing of the text to be on Christ.’ But this did not satisfy Calvin. He would by no means accept such an explanation, and far from attempting by reason and kindness to win the prisoner to views which he himself believed to be more in conformity with the truth, he launched out in passion, and declared that ‘the prisoner would never have had the hardihood thus villainously to corrupt so grand a passage had he not, abandoning all shame, taken he knew not what diabolical pleasure in getting rid of the whole Christian faith.’ The cool way in which Servetus stood this outburst appears to have irritated the Reformer extremely. Servetus was in truth far in advance of Calvin and his age in his exegesis. He was not blind, like all about him, to the true import of the Hebrew writings styled prophetical, but divined their only possible bearing upon events and individuals contemporaneous with their writers—in some cases even past and gone. It was to escape doing violence to the idea of the inspiration under which Servetus credited these ancient writings to have been composed, that he acknowledged a prospective reference to incidents still in the womb of far distant time.

The printing of the ‘Christianismi Restitutio’ was next adduced and made a principal topic of accusation against the prisoner. To the question what object he had proposed to himself in having the book printed, he replied that his main purpose was to ventilate his opinions and have them controverted in case they were seen to be erroneous. But Calvin rejoined that it was by no means necessary to print in order to obtain correction of erroneous opinions, and this more especially in a case such as his, where, as writer, he had already been admonished of his errors.

The delicate, difficult, and most essential element in the impeachment, that, namely, having reference to the Doctrine of the Trinity, was now and again brought into the foreground. Particularly questioned on this subject, Servetus maintained, that previous to the Council of NicÆa no Doctor of the Church had used the word Trinity; and that if the Fathers did acknowledge a distinction in the Divine Essence, it was not real but formal; that the persons were nothing more in truth than dispensations or modes, not distinct entities or persons in the usual acceptation of that word. If he had called the Doctrine of the Trinity, as commonly understood, a dream of St. Augustine and an invention of the Devil, which he did not deny; if he had further characterised the Trinity of modern theologians as a three-headed monster, like the Cerberus of the poets, and styled those who overlooked the true Trinity, which he himself recognised, as Tritheists, it was solely because he believed the unity of God to be denied or annulled by such a procedure. Colladon on this—and prompted we may presume by Calvin—maintained that the views imputed to the Fathers of the Church by the prisoner were false as well as mischievous, and that he could adduce none but apocryphal writings full of absurdities in support of what he said.

Most of the other views and opinions of the prisoner which were quoted as heretical in the act of impeachment were either owned to by him, interpreted in the way he understood them, or were taken as proven by the Court; passages in support of this conclusion having been referred to not only in the printed copy of the ‘Restoration of Christianity,’ but in the manuscript sent privately six years before to Calvin for his strictures. There is one particular, however, not mentioned in the record of proceedings, but given by Calvin,77 that is not uninteresting, as showing the extreme pantheistic views to which Servetus had attained, and may have prejudiced him not a little in the eyes of his Judges, the air of offensive absurdity which the pantheistic doctrine—adversely understood—assumes when pushed to extremes, being made so prominently to appear. The question had turned on the relations between the Divine substance and the substance of creatures and things. ‘All things, all creatures,’ said Servetus, ‘are portions of the substance of God.’ Speaking in his own person, and interposing at this point, Calvin says: ‘Annoyed as I was by so palpable an absurdity, I answered: What, poor man, did one stamp on this floor with his foot and say he trod on God, would not you be horrified in having subjected the Majesty of God to such unworthy usage?’ He, on this, replied: ‘I have not a doubt but that this bench, this table, and all you can point to around us, is of the substance of God.’ When it was then objected to him that on such showing the Devil must be of God substantially; he, smiling impudently, said: ‘Do you doubt it? For my part,’ continued he, ‘I hold it as a general proposition that all things whatsoever are part and parcel of God, and that nature at large is His substantial manifestation.’ Calvin, we imagine, might have spared Servetus on this head when we call to mind how he commits himself to pantheistic views in that passage of his ‘Institutions’ we have already referred to, where he says he only objects to call Nature God because of the harshness and impropriety of the expression. He might further, with reference to the Devil, have bethought him of the verse of Isaiah xlv. 7, where these words occur as coming from Jehovah himself: ‘I form the Light and create Darkness; I make peace and create evil.’ Or of this from Amos iii. 6: ‘Shall there be evil in a city and the Lord hath not done it?’ Or yet this of Ezekiel xx. 25: ‘I gave them statutes that were not good,’ &c. The Jews, through by far the greater part of their history, as a people acknowledged no Dualism in their Deity, as, indeed, they only looked on their God Jahveh as the greatest among the Gods. He was the good and the evil principle in one. But it is easy to imagine the damaging impression which Servetus’s logical but terribly unorthodox statement must have made on the minds of his Judges, ill-informed presumably as they were on such questions. Had Calvin been minded to help instead of determined to crush Servetus, he might even have quoted Luther, who speaks in this wise in his Table Talk: ‘God is present in all created things, and so in the smallest leaflet and tiniest poppy-seed—Gott also gegenwÄrtig ist in allen Creaturen; auch im geringsten BlÄttlein und MohnkÖrnlein.’

Nor were the personal griefs of Calvin overlooked in the inculpation of the prisoner. Beside the thirty letters printed in the ‘Christianismi Restitutio,’ addressed to the Reformer, a copy of his ‘Institutions’ was now laid before the Court. This, like the MS. of the ‘Restitutio,’ sent privately and confidentially to Calvin, was covered on the margins with numerous annotations, little in conformity, as may be supposed, with the accepted tenets of the Church of Geneva, and more rarely still complimentary to the author. At such insolent procedure we know that Calvin was greatly offended, as appears by the language he thought fit to use when writing to Viret and incidentally noticing the liberties that had been taken with him by the annotator: ‘There is not a page of the book,’ he says, ‘that is not befouled with his vomit.’

Neither was the tergiversation of the prisoner in what he had said about Geroult’s part in the printing of the ‘Restitutio’ unnoticed. He is now reproached with the variations in his replies on the subject to the Lieutenant on the 14th, and to the Court on the 15th. His first answer we believe was truthful—Geroult knew all about the book, as we shall find from a letter of Arnoullet to his friend Bertet; his second was untruthful, but uttered to shield the man who had aided him in his enterprise, compromised, as he had come to see, by what he had said before.