THE TRIAL IN ITS SECOND PHASE, WITH THE ATTORNEY-GENERAL OF GENEVA AS PROSECUTOR.

Arrived at this stage, all the documents on which it was proposed to proceed being before the Court, and something more than a presumption of the prisoner’s heretical opinions having already been made to appear, Nicolas de la Fontaine, on his petition to that effect, and his bail, Anthony Calvin, were formally discharged as parties to the suit, its further prosecution being handed over to Claude Rigot, the Attorney-General of the city of Geneva.

Before breaking up, however, and as if to occupy the time until the usual hour of rising, a number of questions irrelevant to the main plea, but tending to gratify the curiosity of the Court, were put to the prisoner. Among the number of these he was asked particularly how he had contrived to escape from the prison of Vienne. He informed the Judges, that he had only passed two nights there; that the Vibailly, De la Cour, was well disposed towards him, he having been of great service to M. Maugiron, an intimate friend of the Vibailly, who had ordered the gaoler to use him well, and allow him the freedom of the garden. Taking advantage of this, he had scaled the wall and got away in the manner already described, the Vibailly having taken care that he should not be pursued and recaptured.

He added that he had intended and even tried in the first instance to get to Spain, his native country; but finding the obstacles so many, and fearing arrest at every moment, he retraced his steps and made his way to Geneva, purposing to proceed to Italy.

Questioned further about the printing of the ‘Restitutio Christianismi,’ he said it had been thrown off to the extent of 1,000 copies, of which the publisher had sent a bale to Frankfort in anticipation of the Easter book-fair of that great mart. This was a piece of information that was not lost on Calvin. He wrote a few days after, having meantime gained further information, to one of the Frankfort members, giving him intimation of what had been done, telling him where the packet was bestowed, and recommending its immediate seizure and destruction, for which he seems also to have furnished some sort of warrant or authority, how obtained we are not informed, though it was probably from Frelon.

Interrogated as to the money he had about him when imprisoned at Vienne, he replied that his cash and valuables had not been taken from him on his arrest there, but were still in his possession when he reached Geneva.

The result of the unwarranted and eventful prosecution of which he was the subject had thus far been anything but favourable to the prisoner. The intervention of Berthelier, above all, may be said to have been highly prejudicial by bringing Calvin into the field in person, and supplying him with an additional motive for urging the suit to the issue that could alone prove satisfactory to him—the condemnation capitally of his insolent, personal, and dreaded theological opponent, now associated with his political enemies. Calvin was in truth much too formidable a personage to be gainsaid on trifling grounds. More than one member of the Court who might have been disposed to favour the prisoner, could it have been done without open defiance of the Reformer, quailed under his glance, and shrank from the responsibility of opposing him, when the direction the prosecution had taken came to be understood. It was even said to be more dangerous to offend John Calvin in Geneva than the King of France on his throne! The prisoner whose life was in debate was a stranger, unknown to the majority of the Councillors; and it was doubtless thought better by the timid to leave him to his fate, than to compromise themselves by taking part with one who on his own admission entertained opinions adverse not only to the doctrine of the Church of Geneva, but to all they had ever had presented to them as characteristic of the Christian faith. There could be no doubt that the man was a schismatic, a heretic; and heretic in Geneva meant an opponent of the head of its Church and the form of Christianity it represented.

Having by this time arrived at a better knowledge of the state of affairs around him, and more than ever aware of the possible danger in which he stood; beginning moreover to feel less confidence in the support which we may be certain had been privately promised him, face to face in fact with the man who had already sought his life and so nearly succeeded in bringing him to a fiery death, Servetus seems now to have seen the necessity of changing the somewhat confident tone he had hitherto maintained in defending his opinions: reticence takes the place of open assertion, and instead of any clear avowal or defence of the views he held, he is now found fencing with the obvious meaning of the language he has used, and the conclusions to which it leads, prevaricating too at times; in a word, doing all in his power to appear not to have written in the way the charges brought against him show from his works that he had.

The trial from this time may be said to have acquired new significance. The private prosecutor and his bail discharged, and the further conduct of the suit handed over to the public prosecutor of the city, gave it additional importance in the eyes of the community at large, and heightened the interest felt in the issues involved.

Thrown into fresh hands, proceedings were necessarily stayed for a few days to give the State Attorney time to get ready his case, so that there was no meeting of the Court until the 21st. Between this date and that of the suspension on the 17th, Calvin is said to have been busy among those of the Council he reckoned either as friends or not as avowed antagonists, satisfying their doubts or strengthening their presumptions of the prisoner’s guilt; showing them the importance to the cause of religion and society that he should be convicted; picturing him as perhaps even less dangerous, if that were possible, on account of the particular theological grounds set forth, than as the enemy of all religion, sole foundation, as he said, of the entire social fabric. The man had been already tried, convicted, and condemned to death by the Roman Catholics of Vienne. Would they, the Senators of Geneva, show themselves less zealous than the Papists of France in the cause of God and their own true faith? Surely they would not, but doing their duty and finding on the evidence, which Calvin relied on as overwhelming, declare the prisoner guilty of the heresies laid to his charge.

Whether seen from a Popish or Protestant point of view, though the matters in debate had no more to do with real piety, with morality, or the foundations of society than with the course of the seasons, Servetus certainly entertained opinions on various topics of transcendental theology different from those commonly received, and in so far was a heretic. Of this much Calvin had no difficulty in satisfying his supporters, who consequently felt themselves absolved of any scruples they might have entertained about condemning one to death on purely speculative grounds which they did not even pretend to understand.78

Although what is said above about Calvin’s private interference with the course of justice has been questioned, when we know that he denounced his opponent from the pulpit in no measured terms, and tampered with the ministers of the Swiss Churches when they were consulted on the case, we need not be too scrupulous in accepting the statement as true. He may have been alarmed by reports of something like wavering on the part of certain members of the Court, and even of questions raised as to the propriety of continuing a suit involving matters so much out of the usual course of criminal procedure as known at Geneva, and the competence of laymen to take such subjects into consideration at all. Rumours to this effect reaching his ears may have led him into a course the impropriety of which in calmer moments he might possibly have understood. But Calvin was wholly without that freedom from passion and that sense of relative equity which go to the constitution of the judicial mind. He lived in a perpetual imbroglio of quasi-criminal proceedings, mostly begotten by his own arbitrary legislation; and he was in the constant habit of interfering in suits before the Courts of Geneva, less as jurisconsult than as judge—as judge, too, in causes so commonly his own. Clerical writers who have lauded his comments on the criminal proceedings of Geneva have not seen these in their true bearings, or they would have expressed themselves more guardedly than they have done.79

That proposals had really been made at the meeting of the 21st to abandon further proceedings against the prisoner, though overruled by the majority, seems to be proclaimed by the resolution then come to, viz., ‘Inasmuch as the heresies charged against Michael Servetus appear to be of great importance to Christianity, resolved to continue the prosecution.’ Such a resolution, though we have no intimation of that which led up to it, coupled with Calvin’s activity out of doors, suffices to show that Servetus had really had a chance of escape from the grip of his pursuer at this particular moment. But the occasion passed; and by way of strengthening themselves in their determination to go on with the questionable business in which they were engaged, we now find the Councillors of the Protestant city of Geneva actually writing to the Popish authorities of Vienne, and making inquiry of them as to the grounds on which Michael Servetus of Villanova, physician, had been imprisoned and prosecuted by them, and how he had escaped from confinement.

To confirm themselves still further in their purpose to proceed, it was moreover resolved that the Councils of Berne, Basle, ZÜrich, and Schaffhausen, together with the ministers of their Churches, should be written to and informed of what had thus far been done and was still in progress. In yielding to the instigations of Calvin, the Court in these last acts is plainly enough seen to hesitate, and be indisposed to trust entirely to his guidance. They would have the authorities of the other Protestant cantons of Switzerland informed of what was going on, and feel the pulse of their confederates as to the propriety of proceeding farther, they, under all the circumstances, being likely to be more impartially disposed than the Church of Geneva and its distinguished head.

The Council of Geneva had in fact already had occasion to know that where simple justice, whether in the interest of the General or the Individual, was concerned, Calvin’s lead should not always be too blindly followed. In the case of Jerome Bolsec, whom Calvin had arraigned for heresy two years before, against whom he had used all his influence to secure a conviction, and in which he would have succeeded (and the man, almost as much a personal enemy as Servetus, would have been beheaded) had he not been foiled by the recommendations of the Swiss Churches and Councils, which were unanimous in counselling moderation, the minor Council of Berne even went so far as to express a distinct opinion against the enforcement of pains or penalties of any kind in cases of imputed heresy.

But Calvin in his prosecution of those who opposed him always shows himself both vindictive and pitiless. Speaking of the way in which he would have had Bolsec disposed of he says: ‘It is our wish that our Church should be so purged of this pestilence that it may not, by being driven hence, become injurious to our neighbours.’ These words will bear one interpretation only—Calvin would have had Bolsec put to death. But he was withstood in his design, and mainly so by the Church of Berne, the language of which must have been highly displeasing to him; for the Reporter, in counselling moderation, says: ‘How much easier is it to win a man by gentleness than to compel him by severity;’ and still more displeasing perhaps was that which follows: ‘It cannot be said of God that He blinds, hardens, and gives to perdition any man, without at the same time assuming that it is God who is the Author of human blindness and reprobation, and therefore the cause of the sin committed.’ Now Bolsec’s offence had been in saying that men are not saved because elect, but are elect because of their faith. ‘None are reprobate,’ continues the Reporter from Berne, ‘by the eternal decrees of God, save those who of their own choice refuse the election freely offered to all. How shall we believe that God ordains the fate of men before their birth; foredooming some to sin and death, others to virtue and eternal life? Would you make of God an arbitrary tyrant, strip virtue of its goodness, vice of its shame, and the wicked of the reproaches of their conscience?’ But this is to cut the ground from under the feet of Calvin. No wonder, therefore, that as the proud man would not, and the self-satisfied man could not, bring himself to admit his error, he would have had him who exposed and led to such an exposition of it put out of the way.80

It was whilst expecting replies from Vienne, and waiting the convenience of M. Rigot, the Attorney-General, that the Court proceeded to make inquiries of the prisoner concerning his relations with Arnoullet, the printer of the ‘Restoration of Christianity,’ a letter of his to a friend of the name of Bertet having now been put in and read to the Court. In this letter, dated July 14, 1553, Arnoullet informs his friend Bertet that he is still in prison, but is promised his liberty next week, having got six substantial sureties for his good behaviour in time to come. He had been villainously deceived, he says, by his manager Geroult, who corrected the rough proofs of the book, but never said a word of the heresies it contained.

‘I asked him,’ the letter proceeds, ‘whether it was all according to God? And he replied that it was; and further, that it contained a number of Epistles addressed to Mons. Calvin, which he was minded to translate into French. But this I forbade—without the permission of the author, which was refused. When last in Geneva, Geroult saw and informed M. Calvin that I had lately been there, without having waited on him. The truth is, that I did not think he would have me in such friendship now as in times past—by reason of my having had anything to do with such a monster, whom God look after! Geroult was in fact in league with the writer, and never let fall a syllable to me until after your departure for Frankfort [in charge of the Bale of the “Christianismi Restoratio” among other book merchandise]. This, as you know, gave occasion to your speaking to me so seriously as you did about the book in question.

‘As to what you say about my sending someone else to Frankfort,—understand me, that I will have no one go but yourself, and that you are to see every copy of the book destroyed, so that there shall be left of it neither a leaf nor half a leaf. Understand, too, that this is to be done without prejudice to anyone. I am only sorry that we have all been so grossly deceived in the business; but if God, our Father, leave us the other goods we possess—more by far than those we shall destroy—it will be well. As to what you say of my having known that Villanovanus had been rejected by the Christian Churches, and that avarice had something to do with my having undertaken the work, let it suffice that I deny this; and our long intimacy must have made you so well acquainted with me, that you will not doubt I now speak the truth. How the Inquisitor came to have your name, I cannot tell. I can only assure you that in all the interrogations to which I have been subjected by him I never named a living soul; nor indeed was there ever mention made of you in my hearing.... Be good enough to say to Mons. Calvin that I shall not be in Geneva again without seeing him; and that if I have not done my duty towards him in all respects, beg him to find some excuse for me. He who is the cause of this [meaning Geroult, doubtless] is now there; and when Monsieur Calvin shall have spoken with me, he will understand the reason of my saying nothing more at present. Make my respects to him meantime, and forgive me if I do not now write more particularly of our affairs.’

This letter we see by the date was written either shortly before or about the time of Servetus’s arrival in Geneva, whither Geroult, who was a native of the city, had betaken himself for safety on the arrest of Servetus and Arnoullet. Bertet, fearing that Arnoullet might suffer in the estimation of Calvin, seems to have thought that the best means of exculpating his friend of complicity with the writer of the heretical book was now to show the letter he had lately received from Vienne to Calvin; and he, we must conclude, laid it forthwith before the Court, with no purpose assuredly of aiding the prisoner in his defence. Arnoullet’s letter in exculpation of himself goes far, as we see, to compromise Geroult; and he being at this time in Geneva, his liberty, perhaps even his life, was brought into danger.81

The letter to Bertet being shown to the prisoner, he averred that he could not take it upon him to say whether it was from Arnoullet or not, he never having seen any of the publisher’s handwriting; he said, however, that it certainly was at Arnoullet’s establishment that the ‘Christianismi Restitutio’ was printed, and that Arnoullet had been arrested and imprisoned at the same time as himself. Arnoullet’s disclaimer of having known anything of the burden of Servetus’s book must certainly be untrue. Unless all else we know in connection with the business be false, he must have had shrewd suspicions of its nature, and the suppression of his name as publisher, and of Vienne as the place of publication, shows that he was not without misgivings of possible unpleasant consequences following the appearance of the work were it known that he had had anything to do with it.

Arnoullet’s letter gave Calvin a hint which he did not fail to improve upon; for he too wrote to Frankfort informing his friends, the Protestant ministers there, of the bale of Servetus’s books that had been sent to their city—by Frelon, as I believe, not by Robert Etienne, the bookseller of Geneva, as has been said,82—recommending its seizure and the destruction of its contents.

Calvin begins his letter thus:—

‘I doubt not you have heard of Servetus, the Spaniard, who more than twenty years ago infected Germany with a villainous book, full of sacrilegious error of every kind. The scoundrel having fled from Germany and lain concealed in France under a false name, has lately concocted a second book out of the contents of the first, but replete with new figments, which he has had printed clandestinely at Vienne, a town not far from Lyons. Of this book we learn that many copies have been sent to Frankfort, in prospect of the approaching Easter fair. The printer, a pious and respectable person, when he came to know that the book was a mere farrago of Errors, suppressed the copies he had on hand. It were long did I enumerate the many Errors, the prodigious blasphemies against God, that are scattered over its pages. Imagine to yourselves a rhapsody made up of the impious ravings of every age; for there is no kind of impiety which this wild beast from hell has not appropriated. You will assuredly find in every page matters that will horrify you. The author is now in prison here at the instance of our magistracy, and I hope will shortly be condemned and punished. But you are to aid us against the further spread of such pestiferous poison. The messenger [the bearer of this] will tell you where the books are bestowed and their number; and the bookseller to whom they are consigned will, I believe, make no objections to their being given to the flames. Did he throw any obstacle in the way of this, however, I venture to think you are so well disposed, that you will take steps to have the world purged of such noxious corruption. You shall not want authority, indeed, for what you do in the business. If you are allowed to have your way, it will not then be necessary to seek the interference of your magistrates. But I have such confidence in you, that I feel persuaded my hint will suffice to guide your action. The matter, nevertheless, is of such moment, that I entreat you, for Christ’s sake, not to allow the occasion of showing yourselves zealous in your office to pass unheeded.

‘Farewell, &c.

‘Geneva, 6 Calends of September, 1553.’

The session of the 21st, preliminaries ended, was occupied in the beginning with a dispute between the prisoner and Calvin, who came into Court on this occasion again accompanied by a number of ministers, his colleagues, introduced, says the Record of proceedings, to maintain the contrary of the prisoner’s allegations in respect of the authorities he cites as favouring his views. Calvin thereupon, taking the lead, proceeded to interpret the passages of the Fathers referred to by the prisoner in a sense different from that put upon them by him, and showed satisfactorily that the word Trias or Trinity had really been used by writers before the date of the NicÆan Council.

It was on this occasion, as we learn from Calvin,83 that on a copy of Justin Martyr being produced by him in support of his statement, Servetus expressed a wish to see a Latin translation as well as the original Greek, a slip which Calvin did not fail to turn to the prisoner’s disadvantage, for knowing that there was no Latin translation of Justin, he immediately challenged the prisoner with being ignorant of Greek. ‘Look’ee,’ says he in his DÉclaration pour maintenir la vraie foy, ‘this learned man, this Servetus, who plumes himself on having the gift of tongues, is found to be about as much able to read Greek as an infant to say the A. B. C. ‘Seeing himself thus caught’ continues Calvin, ‘I took occasion to reproach him with his impudence. What means this, said I? The book has not been translated into Latin, and you cannot read Greek. Yet, you pretend you are familiar with Justin. Tell me, I pray you, whence you have the quotations you produce so freely as if you had Justin in your sleeve? But he with his front of brass, as was his wont, though he had leapt from the frying pan into the fire—sauta du coq À l’Ânc—quite unabashed, gave not the slightest sign of feeling shame.’ No one, however, who has been at the pains to look into the works of Servetus will doubt for a moment that he was not only a competent Greek scholar, but well advanced in the Hebrew also, with both of which languages he shows that he was even critically acquainted. Seeing himself beaten on the occurrence of the word Trinity in the Greek of Justin, he may have thought to find a makeweight in a Latin translation against the original produced by Calvin. There is indeed an ample display both of erudition and linguistic accomplishments even in Servetus’s first work, the seven books on Trinitarian Error.

Another and still more significant discussion now arose between the Reformer and the prisoner—and in these ever-recurring debates we see the persistency with which Calvin stuck to his opponent—as to the sense in which the expression Son of God was to be understood. Servetus maintained that it was not properly applied to him who bore it until the moment of his birth. Calvin, on the contrary, insisted that in conformity with the usual interpretation of the first chapter of the Gospel according to John, the authority of the Creeds and the teaching of the Churches, the words must be held to refer to the Divine Word which became incarnate in Jesus Christ, having until then been a distinct subsistence in the essence of God from Eternity. In reply to this, Servetus explained and said that the common interpretation of the language of John was mistaken; the Son, as he declared, having only existed formally or as an idea, dispensation or mode in the mind of God previous to the Incarnation and Birth of Christ, not as an entity—a person, in the usual acceptation of the word, possessed of distinct individual existence.

Speaking authoritatively now and as from himself, Calvin rejoined that if the Word had not been a distinct reality in the essence of God, it could not have united itself as such with the humanity of Christ; that the body of Christ must then have been wholly of the substance of God; and being so—not being perfect man as well as perfect God—the redemption of mankind could not have been effected by his death. Why the impossibility, thus assumed, is not said. But let us pause an instant and think of one pious man tried for his life by another pious man, on grounds such as these!—grounds on which neither the one nor the other could find footing for a moment.

Without opposing his prosecutor by urging his own views more particularly at this stage, Servetus now requested that he might be furnished with the books necessary to him in his defence, and have pens, ink, and paper supplied to him, with which to write a petition to the Council. Calvin on this agreed to leave the volumes he had brought into Court in the hands of the prisoner, and the Judges ordered that any others he required should be purchased for him at his proper cost. The jailer finally was directed to supply him with writing materials; the paper, however, being limited to a single sheet! and to see particularly to his being kept secluded—indication in either case, we must presume, that the prisoner was believed not to lack friends or prompters from whom Calvin thought it would be well to keep him apart.