Because the Papists persecute the truth, should we on that account refrain from repressing error?
—John Calvin
On the hill of Champel, just outside the city of Geneva, a man was made ready for burning. A crown of straw and leaves sprinkled with sulphur was placed on his head, and a thick rope was wound around his neck. He was chained to a stake and a pile of fresh wood lay at his feet. A book of his own authorship, called The Restoration of Christianity, was bound to his arm. When the executioner waved the torch before his face, he cried out: "O Jesus. Son of the Eternal God, have pity on me." Then the faggots were lit.
The fire's victim was a 42-year-old Spaniard named Michael Servetus. His crime, for which he had been duly tried and sentenced: religious heresy. Specifically, it was his denial of infant baptism and the doctrine of the Trinity. (The minister who accompanied him to the stake later observed that, had Servetus switched adjectives, and called on "the Eternal Son of God," he might have saved his life.) Last week, for the 400th anniversary of Servetus' death, Roland H. Bainton, one of Protestantism's foremost modern historians (Here I Stand, The Reformation of the 16th Century), brought out his new book, Hunted Heretic (Beacon Press; $3.75)> the definitive biography of militant Protestantism's most celebrated self-inflicted casualty.
The Nauseating Smoke. Michael Servetus was a classic 16th century man who could have existed only in that day, when a learned man had to know something about everything. He was a capable physician, the first in the West to discover that the blood circulates in the lungs. He was an astrologer of some repute, the author of several handy works on divination. He was a scholar in Hebrew and Greek, and, even by his enemies' testimony, a brilliant theologian.
Servetus' trouble was his instinctive knack for making himself a one-man minority. As Historian Bainton concludes: "Servetus could not agree altogether with anybody." His minority stand on medicine was scientifically useful, and, as an independent astrologer, he gained the confidence of the court of Francis I. But his free-lance theology, at a time when Reformation Europe was quickly forming up into tightly disciplined Catholic and Protestant camps, was not to go unpunished.
Servetus started his career on the Catholic side of the fence, as a promising scholar-assistant to the confessor of Emperor Charles V. By 19, however, his theological studies had already made him a Protestant, and in 1530 he fled to the Reformation strongholds of Basel, and later, Strasbourg. He was welcomed in both places, until he started explaining his advanced religious views. His book, On the Errors of the Trinity, an attack on the "three-headed Cerberus" of traditional theology, shocked the reformers as much as it did the Catholics. In 1532, his book already banned in Strasbourg and Basel, Servetus prudently packed up and got out of Reformation territory.