THE AUTHORITIES OF BASLE TAKE NOTICE OF HIS BOOK. HE WRITES TWO DIALOGUES BY WAY OF APPENDIX TO IT AND LEAVES SWITZERLAND.

Failing to make any impression on the Swiss and German Reformers whose countenance he had been so anxious to gain, we have seen Servetus in his letter to Œcolampadius declaring his readiness to quit Basle, to which he must have returned, if it were only not said that he went as a fugitive, and giving something like an engagement to his correspondent to review and, reviewing, to modify or retract some things he had said in his book. That some such engagement was given we conclude from the letter of Œcolampadius to the magistrates of Basle, to which we shall refer immediately, and from which it would seem that it was through the forbearance, if not even the more friendly interference, of the Reformer that our author escaped arrest and imprisonment at this time. The seven books or chapters on erroneous ideas of the Trinity had not fallen stillborn from the press; neither had the presence of the writer in Basle passed unobserved. The book being seen as heretical in the highest degree by the ministers, the presence of its writer among them was felt as matter of grievance by both clergy and laity; so that the Civic Council held it within the scope of their duties to take notice of the innovator, of whom they heard so much that was discreditable, and, by laying hands on him, either to make him pay in person then and there, or to send him away, like an infected bale, to spread his poison elsewhere.

Previous to acting, however, they thought it would be well to have the opinion of their chief Pastor, Œcolampadius, on what had best be done, and so requested him to advise with them on the subject. He replied by a long letter in which he recapitulates the chief topics discussed by Servetus in his treatise. ‘He, Œcolampadius, will do what he can to place the good man’s views before them,—if indeed he may venture to speak of the writer as a good man; for it seems that he strives at times as much to darken the light as to enlighten the darkness, mixing up incongruities rashly and not seldom stopping short of contradicting himself. He opposes the orthodox doctors continually, and uses certain words in an arbitrary and unusual sense. He denies the coeternity of the Father and the Son, a doctrine hitherto held sacred by all the Christian churches; and only recognises the sonship from the moment of the engenderment, or rather of the birth of Christ. He even derides the idea of God having a son from eternity, and asks whence the heavenly father had his wife, or whether he were of both sexes in himself? He will only recognise the eternity of the Son as an Idea in the divine mind: the Son was to be, but was not yet, until he appeared in the flesh. He will by no means concede that the Word of St. John was the Christ; yet he speaks of three persons in the one God; but it is with glozing and an arbitrary meaning attached to the word person, and with reasonings which, if they sometimes make for his views, are at other times opposed to them, he neither thinking nor speaking as do the apostles, and wresting the words of the fathers—of Tertullian and IrenÆus especially—from the interpretation commonly put upon them.

‘Along with all this and much more that is objectionable, there are still some things in the book that are good; nevertheless as a whole it could not but offend me. God grant that the writer acknowledge the rashness which has led him to speak so unadvisedly as he has done of matters which transcend our human intelligence, and that he may live to amend what he has said. As to the book, it would be well perhaps that it were either totally suppressed, or were read by those only who are not likely to be hurt by objectionable writings. The errors he has fallen into acknowledged, he will retract in his writings—retractÂrit scriptis. Perhaps he was not himself aware of their extent, or they were not seen by him as of such importance as they are in fact. But I leave all to your prudence and discretion, humbly commending myself and my work to your favour.’33

If we are to understand the retractÂrit scriptis of the above as a promise from Servetus to retract in a future work what he has said in his first, he certainly did not keep his word in the ‘Dialogi de Trinitate,’34 which he published in the course of the following year. In the Preface to these dialogues, it is true, he informs the candid reader that he retracts all he had ‘lately written in the seven books of erroneous conceptions concerning the Trinity, not because what I say there is false, but because the work is imperfect and written as it were by a child for children. I pray you nevertheless to hold by so much as you find there that may help you to understand the subjects discussed. All that is barbarous, confused and faulty, ascribe to my inexperience and the carelessness of the printer. I would not that any Christian were offended by what I say; for God is used sometimes to make known his wisdom to the world by weak vessels. Look at the thing itself, therefore, I pray you, and if you take good heed, my stammering will prove no hindrance to you.’

The reputed printer of Servetus’s Treatise and Two Dialogues, Jo. Secerius, has no particular name as a typographer. But these little works are by no means incorrectly printed; they show few typographical errors—so few that they must almost certainly have been read for press by the writer himself. The printer therefore is not to be blamed for any shortcomings of the kind referred to by the author—if there be defect it is his own, and it was the matter not the manner that had been found fault with. But the Preface is apologetic in directions uncalled for, and is meaningless in fact. Servetus did not think himself a weak vessel; neither did he look on his work as the work of a child for children; and as for any retractation of his opinions, nothing seems to have been further from his mind. On the contrary the mysticism of the writer of the Fourth Gospel appears to have taken a firmer hold of our author than it had done before, and to have acted as fresh ferment to the mystical element so abundant in his proper nature. There may be modification of some of the views already enunciated, but from none of them is there recession. The opposition he met with from the leading Reformers seems even to have added point and precision to his writing. He is more outspoken than before, and is still less chary in the kind of language he uses towards opponents. The usual conception of a partitioned Deity he declares to be simply blasphemous; they who seriously entertain it are fools, and so blind that were Christ to come among them now and declare he was the Son of God, they would crucify him anew. The Dialogues, instead of any denial and retractation, are a reiteration and defence of almost all he has said in his first production; although, indeed, we do observe that where he can he occasionally approximates somewhat to more orthodox views; in that passage very notably where he speaks of the Son being of the same essence (homousios), and even consubstantial with the Father. (‘Dial.’ i., f. II, b.) But these are really no more than words set down under the varying impulses of mind to which the writer gave way, and are deprived of any meaning that might attach to them by something that has either gone before or that comes immediately after.

The discussion of Luther’s Justification by Faith, to which it must be presumed his attention had been particularly called by Œcolampadius as likely to be offensive to the Lutherans, is renewed in the Dialogues; and the writer is so far carried away by his own exaggerated estimate of the mental condition implied in faith or belief, that he seems even to accept in toto the principle he would controvert. Though he is elsewhere and ever so emphatic in praise of good works or charity, we here find him not sparing in condemnation of those who hope through their doings of any kind to achieve salvation. Monks and nuns accordingly, who sin more especially in this direction and who by the assumption of peculiar habits and behaviour think to make themselves agreeable to God, are an especial abomination to him. Man, he declares, cannot be justified by the observance of vows or rules of any kind; for these are not written in the law of God, and in themselves are without significance. ‘A most pestilent thing it is, that Papal decrees and monastic vows are assumed as means of salvation. When men bind themselves by vows to particular observances, they virtually declare that the salvation they have through Christ is insufficient, and lay themselves fast in those bonds of the law from which Christ came to set them free.’

In spite of frequently recurring contradictions and something that is objectionable on the score of taste, we nevertheless think that no one, however little disposed to abet Servetus’s general views, could peruse these dialogues without coming to the conclusion that the writer was a man of a sincerely pious nature, who had read much, and reflected deeply, feeling it a necessity of his nature to expend himself in the mystical verbiage in which religious enthusiasm loves to robe itself as in a sufficient and seemly garment.

The seven Books and two Dialogues on the Trinity of Servetus have been spoken of as an attempt to hold a middle course between the Roman Catholic and the Reformed churches; and there may be something to warrant such a conclusion from what is said in the chapter ‘De Justitia Regni Christi.’ But Servetus’s Trinity is of another kind from that of either the older or the younger sister, and where not assimilable to the Neoplatonic ideas of Philo, it followed from the Pantheistic principles which, like deep thinkers in general, he had adopted. God to Servetus was the ?? ?a? p??, the One and the All; and if at any time he speaks of Christ as God, it is as a manifestation of the Divine in human form—a dispensation in his own phraseology, a mode in Spinozistic language. The Divine Unity, and its manifestation in the world in infinite modes, may be said to be the fundamental idea in the philosophical as well as the theological system of Servetus.35