PARIS. ASSUMPTION OF THE NAME OF VILLENEUVE OR VILLANOVANUS. ACQUAINTANCE WITH CALVIN.

His indifferent reception by the German and Swiss Reformers must have satisfied Servetus that there was no abiding place for him among them. He was doubtless disappointed and not a little disconcerted by the treatment he met with at their hands. He had come as a light-bringer, as a fellow striver for the Truth through independent reading of the Scriptures. Studious and learned; smitten with divine philosophy; emancipated from the fetters of the church of Rome; tolerant and charitable, he doubtless thought that the liberal studies in Humanity and the Greek letters in which he knew the Reformers excelled, must as a matter of course have imparted to them something of the liberality and comprehensiveness he felt in himself. Face to face with their leaders in Basle and Strasburg, however, he was undeceived; and when he saw that his book on Trinitarian Error, instead of bringing him fame and friends, earned him nothing but evil report and enemies, and might even compromise his personal safety, there was nothing left for him but to pack up and begone.

He must have quitted Switzerland immediately after writing his letter to Œcolampadius, and in all likelihood taken up his quarters at Hagenau, where he lived quietly for some weeks or months engaged in writing and supervising the printing of the ‘Two Dialogues,’ with which and the concluding anathema against all tyrants of the church, as a parting shot, he went on his way to France, reaching Paris towards the end of 1532. He had in fact made the German-speaking parts of Switzerland and Elsass where he was known, too hot for him, to use a familiar phrase; and the parts where French was the mother tongue had not yet taken up with Calvin or another great name opposed to the Papacy, that might have led his thoughts towards them. He was besides but indifferently acquainted with the German language; in circumstances, too, we may presume, that made it impossible for him to remain in any place where he had not remunerative occupation of some sort; and this, with the whole world of the Reformation against him, he saw he could not now obtain in quarters where he had once hoped to find a welcome and a footing. He had therefore no choice left but retreat; and Paris was the place where accomplishments of the kind he possessed were most likely to find a market.

With all his hardihood and self-confidence, Servetus was not without so much prudence as assured him that a certain amount of caution and reticence was required of everyone who would live at peace among his fellow men. He doubtless imagined at one time, but had already discovered his mistake, that among heretics, as he had been accustomed to hear the Reformers designated, he might freely expend himself in heresy. To the very end of his life, he seems to have had some difficulty in divining why he had not been welcomed by them with open arms as a brother. But he was well aware that Roman Catholic France had yet less in common with Michael Serveto, alias RevÉs, author of the Seven books and Two dialogues on Trinitarian Error, than Protestant Switzerland and Germany.

Servetus felt that the writer of these works could not safely show himself in Paris under either his proper family or his maternal name, and so fell readily upon one derived from the town of his nativity, Villanueva. Servetus seems indeed at no time to have been very particular as to his name and designation. On his trial at Vienne he is of Tudela in Navarre, on that at Geneva, of Villanova in Aragon; and Tollin finds him inscribed in the academic register of Paris (1536) and in that of Montpellier, which he must have visited some time in 1540, as neither of Tudela nor Villanova, but of Saragossa! During all the years he lived in France, he was never known save as Monsieur Michel Villeneuve, or, when he wrote in Latin, as Michael Villanovanus. Under the name of Villeneuve he now announced himself, entered as student of mathematics and physics at one of the colleges, and at a later period took his degrees of M.A. and M.D. in the University of Paris. Under the same name he subsequently wrote and edited various works at Lyons; and it was as M. Villeneuve that he finally became known in the town of Vienne in Dauphiny, where he lived for twelve years engaged in the practice of medicine, and on terms of intimacy with the Archbishop and all the notabilities of the place, both lay and clerical.

As a man of scholarly acquirements Servetus in the first instance probably found employment, and the means of living with some of the typographers of Paris, as reader and corrector of the press, a line of life which he certainly followed for the next three or four years, in the course of which we find notices of him first at Orleans, then at Avignon, and finally at Lyons, one of the chief centres of the printing and publishing business that had been called into such vigorous life by the revival of learning, the discovery of the art of printing with moveable types, and finally and very essentially by the Reformation.

It was during his first residence of about two years at Paris, 1532-1534, that he made the acquaintance of the man who became in the end his most implacable enemy, and the immediate cause of his untimely and cruel death. This was no other than the celebrated John Calvin, then a young man and about the same age as himself. Partially emancipated from the fetters of the faith in which he had been born and bred, but not less firmly bound in others of his own fashioning, Calvin had already attracted the notice of his friends and the public by his natural abilities and his scholarly acquirements, and been pointed out as likely to influence the progress of the Reformation in his native France. Hearing of Calvin’s presence in Paris, Servetus as Villeneuve must have sought him out, and, still full of the familiar theological subject, have made an attempt upon him as he had already done upon Œcolampadius and the others, for countenance and approval in the discovery he had made of what he believed to be the true saving Christian faith. But with no better success we must conclude; for though the two young men met oftener than once in private, it was without coming to any agreement. They had, therefore, actually resolved on a public discussion, with a view to the voidance of their theological differences.

This, however, never came to pass. Such an exhibition, indeed, could not have taken place at the time without danger to both. Calvin, in his young zeal, and for what he held to be the honour of God, would have faced the danger, but the individual known to his Parisian friends and Calvin as Michel Villeneuve must have seen on afterthought that he could make no public appearance as defender of the outrÉ opinions he entertained, without betraying the Michael Serveto of the De Trinitatis Erroribus and Dialogues who lay hidden behind the adopted name; and this he knew would be not only to disconcert all his present plans, but assuredly to compromise his life. Calvin, we must presume, had not at this time heard of Servetus’s books; very certainly he had not read them; for one so acute and well-informed on theological matters as he, would not have been more than a few minutes face to face with their author without detecting him. But we find no hint in Calvin’s writings that he then surmised who Villeneuve, his Parisian acquaintance, really was, and conclude that he lived for a dozen years or more without suspecting that the individual he discovered as Michael Serveto of the Book on Trinitarian Error in his correspondent of Vienne, of the year 1546, was the same Villeneuve he had known in Paris in 1534.

Calvin then would have faced the danger of the public discussion, though persecution was hot at the time against heresy, and he was not unsuspected on this score. The danger to him, however, would have been slight in comparison with that which Servetus must have incurred. Calvin would not have stood forth on this occasion as the defender of any heresy, but of the very fundamentals of the Christian faith as embodied in its Creeds; to some of the most essential propositions in which Servetus, on the contrary, must have shown himself diametrically opposed. Servetus therefore, in this instance at least, saw perforce that discretion was the better part of valour, and wisely stayed away. He was in truth far too deeply compromised to venture on an appearance; for if discovered to be Michael Serveto, nothing could have saved him from the heretic’s death. He had nothing for it therefore but to forfeit his engagement and lay himself open to Calvin’s reproachful ‘vous avez fuy la luite’—you fled the encounter—of a later and to him more momentous epoch in their common lives.