Michael Servetus Biography

Michael Servetus is in more than one respect one of the most remarkable men of the sixteenth century; while the tragic death which he suffered made him the first and most conspicuous martyr to the faith whose history we are following. Records of the life of Servetus are scanty and inconsistent, and the gaps in them have often been filled up by conjectures which have later proved to be mistaken.

Servetus, Michael, in Spanish, Miguel Serveto (1511-1553), Spanish physician and theologian, who was executed for his beliefs by the Calvinist government of Geneva. He was born in Villanueva de Sijena, Huesca Province. He studied law at the University of Toulouse, medicine at the universities of Paris and Montpellier. Beginning in 1540 he practiced medicine in Vienne, France, where he also served as the personal physician to the archbishop. About 1545 he began a correspondence with the French Protestant theologian John Calvin.

Although still a nominal Catholic, he described his heretical opposition to the concept of the Trinity. He wrote to Calvin in 1545 about his desire to go there, but Calvin did not answer and in a letter to one of his ministers he condemned him to death, a goal he got in 1553. He was arrested while attending church in Geneva, convicted of heresy and blasphemy against Christianity, and burned at the stake on October 27, 1553.

Servetus's religious opinions were strongly opposed by Catholics and Protestants of his time. In 1531 he repudiated, in his De Trinitatis Erroribus (On the Error of the Trinity), the tripartite personality of God. In 1532 he wrote Dialogorum de Trinitate Libri Duo (Second Book of Dialogues on the Trinity). His scientific contributions were also notable; his Christianismi Restitutio (The Restoration of Christianity), published shortly before his death in 1553, included the first accurate description of the pulmonary circulatory system.

Servetus was born in 1511 at Villanueva de Sijena, a small city in Aragon, where his father had received an appointment as royal Notary, an office of some distinction, and where the family lived in handsome style. His parents were devoted Catholics, and it is thought that he may at first have been designed for the priesthood. Little is known to a certainty about his early education, but he seems to have been a precocious youth, and early in his teens to have acquired a knowledge of Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, and to have become well versed in mathematics and the scholastic philosophy. At age 14 he entered the service of Juan Quintana, a scholarly Franciscan monk.

When Servetus was seventeen his father determined that he should enter the law, and to that end sent him across the Pyrenees to the University of Toulouse, then the most celebrated in France. Even in his youth Servetus was struck by the fact that the doctrine of the trinity was a serious obtstacle to evangelization of the Moors and Jews. While studying law at the University of Toulouse in France, he read the Bible, which the invention of the printing press had made newly and dangerously available. He was surprised to find the trinity nowhere explicitly mentioned, much less defined, in the sacred text.

After two years at the University, Servetus was recalled, in late 1529, to the service of Quintana, who had been appointed confessor to Emperor Charles V. He was to accompany Quintana as he traveled with the imperial party to the coronation of the Emperor in Bologna, Italy. In Italy Servetus was horrified by riches of the church, the adoration accorded the Pope, and the worldliness of the priesthood. Some time in 1530 Servetus dropped out of the emperor's entourage and made his way to the Swiss city of Basel to join the Protestants. He stayed for months in the household of Oecolampadius, the local pastor and Reform leader, nevertheless he did not find any support on his views.

Having worn out his welcome there with constant theological dispute, Servetus moved to more tolerant Strasburg where he met the town reformers Bucer and Capito. There, in 1531, he published De Trinitatis Erroribus (On the Errors of the Trinity). If Servetus hoped his book would persuade the new Protestant establishment to re-think orthodox trinitarian doctrine, as traditionally interpreted from the fourth century Council of Nicaea through the late mediaeval Scholastics, and replace it with his own formulation, he was quickly disappointed.

Though Protestants admired some aspects of Servetus' thought, they deplored many others. Moreover, they were especially defensive concerning their trinitarian orthodoxy, having no desire to call upon themselves still more Roman Catholic denunciation. The Lutheran reformer Melanchthon, commenting on De Trinitatis Erroribus, lamented, "As for the Trinity you know I have always feared this would break out some day. Good God, what tragedies this question will excite among those who come after us!"

Servetus tried the effect of a more conciliatory volume, Dialogorum de Trinitate (Dialogues on the Trinity), published the following year. But in it he neither conceded anything important to his system, nor even softened the vituperation of his rhetoric. His second volume was neither intended nor received as a recantation. His books were confiscated, and he was warned out of several Protestant towns. Meanwhile, in 1532, the Supreme Council of the Inquisition in Spain began proceedings to summon him, or to apprehend him if he would not appear before the tribunal. His brother, Juan, a priest, was sent to persuade him to return to Spain for questioning. He was terrified. He later wrote of this period, "I was sought up and down to be snatched to my death." He fled to Paris and surfaced there with a new name, Michel de Villeneuve.

As "Villeneuve" Servetus studied mathematics and medicine at colleges in Paris, then a center of religious ferment. Nicholas Cop, Rector of the University, was forced to flee the city after an inaugural address deemed too Protestant. A young student of Servetus' acquaintance, John Calvin, who may have written the address, had also to leave town and to go into hiding. Sometime during the next year Calvin risked his life to return to Paris that he might meet Servetus and respond to his theological challenges.

Servetus, perhaps afraid of being seen with a fugitive, did not show up. Driven to witness for his religious cause, he yet felt unready to be its effective champion. "On this account I delayed," he recalled, "and also because of imminent persecution, so that with Jonah I longed rather to flee to the sea or to one of the New Isles."

Servetus left temporarily Paris and began to support himself in France by working as corrector of proof in Lyon, which ranked next to Paris as a publishing center. He was employed for over two years by Treschel, a famous publishing house. In this capacity Servetus served as editor of a new edition of Ptolemy’s Geography (1535), which the recent explorations in the New World had made necessary. This work was enriched by many pungent notes, and one of these, which spoke of Palestine as a very poor country for a “promised land,” afterwards brought him into trouble as a defamer of Moses.

Inspired by some of the medical works published by Trechsel, Servetus decided to return to the study of medicine. From 1536-38 he was a medical student at the University of Paris. He followed Andreas Vesalius as assistant to Hans Gunther in dissection. Gunther wrote that "Michael Villonovanus" had a knowledge of Galen "second to none." Servetus soon came to differ from Galen in the matter of pulmonary circulation. Galen had supposed aeration of the blood took place in the heart and assigned the lungs a fairly minor function. Servetus, by examining the wall of the heart and noting the size of the pulmonary artery, concluded that transformation of the blood, accomplished by the release of waste gases and the infusion of air, occurred in the lungs. It is not clear whether Servetus or a contemporary, unknown to Servetus, first made this discovery. Servetus was the first to publish. Although he only expressed the new knowledge as a lengthy metaphorical aside in his theological writing, he was the first person to record a modern understanding of pulmonary respiration.

In 1538 Servetus, as Villeneuve, got into trouble with the faculty of medicine, the Parlement of Paris, and the Inquisition for mixing astrology with medicine. Although he was acquitted by the Inquisition, the Parlement ruled that his published self-defense (Disceptatio Pro Astrologia) was to be confiscated and he was to desist from the practice of astrology.

Servetus left Paris shortly thereafter, perhaps without a degree, to practice medicine in the area of Lyons. Around 1540 he became the personal physician of Pierre Palmier, Archbishop of Vienne.

During his twelve-year residence in Vienne, the longest quiet period of his troubled life, Servetus acquired fame and fortune as a physician and, at the same time, he continued working as proof corrector. In 1542, he brought out a new edition of Ptolemy which he softened down some of the notes that had given offense before. He next prepared an edition of the Santes Pagnini's Bible, completed in seven volumes in 1545. His introduction and notes anticipate modern biblical criticism and show a marked advance in sophistication beyond that of his earlier theological writing.

At the same time, Michel de Villeneuve, Servetus continued cultivating his interest in theology with the prepararion of his major theological treatise, Christianismi Restitutio (The Restoration of Christianity). He also began, in 1546, a fateful secret correspondence with his old acquaintance, John Calvin. By this time Calvin, author of Institutio Christianae Religionis (Institutions of Christian Religion), 1536, and pastor and chief reformer of Geneva, was the most prestigious figure in the Reform branch of Protestantism.

Calvin's theology had included little mention of the trinitarian nature of the godhead until, in 1537, another reformer, Pierre Caroli, accused him of being an Arian. Although cleared by a synod at Lausanne, Calvin was afterwards on his guard and determined to deal severely with deviations in this area of orthodoxy. The subject, associated with unpleasant memories, was distasteful to him. Servetus, surely aware of Calvin's previous lack of clarity on the subject, bombarded him with letters insisting on unorthodox conceptions more radical than those he had presented a decade and more ago. Calvin replied with increasing impatience and asperity. Servetus sent Calvin a manuscript of his yet unpublished Restitutio. Calvin reciprocated by sending a copy of the Institutio. Servetus returned it with abusive annotations. On the day Calvin broke off the correspondence, he wrote to his colleague, Guillaume Farel, that should Servetus ever come to Geneva, "if my authority is of any avail I will not suffer him to get out alive."

When Servetus published the Restitutio in early 1553 he sent an advance copy to Geneva. The printed text included thirty of his letters to Calvin. Soon afterward, at Calvin's behest, the identity of "Villeneuve" was betrayed to the Catholic Inquisition in Vienne. After his arrest and interrogation Servetus managed to escape from the prison.

On his way, perhaps, to northern Italy where, he believed, there were people receptive to his writings, he made his way across the border to Geneva.

Recognized at a Geneva church service, he was arrested and tried for heresy by Protestant authorities.

The secular officials were unable to establish that Servetus was an immoral disturber of the public peace. Nevertheless, he made damaging theological statements in the course of a written debate with Calvin [Complaint of Nicolas de la Fontaine against Servetus]. The Council of Geneva, after receiving the advice of churches in four other Swiss cities, convicted Servetus of antitrinitarianism and opposition to child baptism. Calvin asked that Servetus be mercifully beheaded. The Council insisted he should be burned at the stake.

Spectators were impressed by the tenacity of Servetus' faith. Perishing in the flames, he is said to have cried out, "O Jesus, Son of the Eternal God, have pity on me!" Farel, who witnessed the execution, observed that Servetus, defiant to the last, might have been saved had he but called upon "Jesus, the Eternal Son." A few months later Servetus was again executed, this time in effigy, by the Catholic Inquisition in France.

Servetus, surely aware of Calvin's previous lack of clarity on the subject, bombarded him with letters insisting on unorthodox conceptions more radical than those he had presented a decade and more ago. Calvin replied with increasing impatience and asperity. Servetus sent Calvin a manuscript of his yet unpublished Restitutio. Calvin reciprocated by sending a copy of the Institutio. Servetus returned it with abusive annotations.

Sounds like FreeRepublic.

Cordially,

**Calvin asked that Servetus be mercifully beheaded.**

Huh?

Is Zarwacki mercifully beheading captured 'infidels' in Iraq? I hope he doesn't start burning people at the stake, like the 'godly' Council of Geneva chose to do.

And Mr. Farel, that was witness to the execution, saying that had Servetus only have called on "Jesus, the Eternal Son", his life might have been spared.

Well, I guess Mr. Farel must have forgotten the words of Peter, who answered the Lord's question about his own identity: "Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God."

Yes, it's obvious that the 'pharisees' were alive and still very religious in 1553.

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