then he made everything else beautiful and good as the word of Genesis states.

Transcription

1 The Legacy of the Heretic By the Rev. Julia Hamilton Delivered on March 26, 2017 at the Unitarian Society of Santa Barbara READINGS This morning we will be reflecting on the life of Michael Servetus, who lived in the first half of the 16th century a theologian whose radical Unitarian ideas led to his death as a heretic, condemned by Protestants and Catholics alike. Here are some of the writings that were deemed to dangerous to be allowed to flourish: God is not like a point, but he is an infinite sea of substance, giving essence to everything, causing all things to exist, and sustaining the essences of everything. [God] descends to the lowest depths and ascends to the highest and fills all things. He walks upon the wings of the wind, rides upon the air and inhabits the place of angels. His place is not any particular part of heaven...he dwells within us. By a natural order, all motions are led back to one prime mover, all natures to one nature, all lives to one first life, through which all other things live and are moved. All ancient authorities said that God lit up everything from chaos... He gave them visible and bright forms in the manner of his own beauty. "He is beautiful and good and he made the first light beautiful and good like himself, and then he made everything else beautiful and good as the word of Genesis states. All things are one, because all things are one in God, in whom, as the One, they exist.

2 SERMON One of the rarest books in the world today is titled Christianismi Restitutio, The Restoration of Christianity. Published in 1553, it was the last book written by Michael Servetus, and it was the book that was strapped to his arm as he was burned at the stake for heresy by the famously strict protestant reformer John Calvin. Although Servetus had 1000 copies printed, only three survive today. The rest were all hunted down and burned as fast as John Calvin could get his hands on them. Ironically, one of the three copies that still exists was Calvin s own. It seems Calvin could not bring himself to burn what he thought was the last and final one. If you ever want to see one of these pieces of our Unitarian history, they can be found in the National Library of France, the Austrian National Library, and the Edinburgh University Library. Why was this book so terrible, that it was destroyed by Protestants and Catholics alike? What was the crime that made Michael Servetus hated and hunted by both the Catholic Inquisition and the reform-minded Protestants? Servetus was a Heretic, through and through. He did not agree with either the Protestants or the Catholics about many theological positions. He questioned the doctrine of the Trinity. He believed that Jesus was born human. He did not believe that children were sinful. He read Muslim and Jewish texts and found wisdom in them. He believed that God infused the whole world, rather than sitting apart from the world. And he did not believe that the church, Catholic or Protestant or any of them, was infallible. As Servetus said at the end of one of his other books, Dialogues on the Trinity, I do not fully agree with these people, neither do I with those others, because they all seem to be partly right, and partly wrong. May God show us our own mistakes, and not be stubborn. It would be much easier to discern these questions if, in the church, everybody was allowed to speak their own minds... How much easier it would be to discern the truth if everyone were free to speak their own minds -What a truly Unitarian statement! Heresy comes from the Greek word hairesis, which means choice. It is in opposition to Orthodoxy, which in Greek means right belief. Heresy is a choice which strays from the accepted right belief, especially as it comes to religion. I am proud to stand in a long line of heretics. The first time I was actually called a heretic was my senior year in high school. It was at the beginning of a class in European History, and the teacher, who was one of the most beloved teachers in the school, had everyone go around the room and introduce themselves, and he also had people say what religion they were. I don t know if this would fly in schools today,

3 but it was 25 years ago in Louisiana, so no one batted an eye when people asked you where you went to church. We went around the room, and when he came to me, I proudly said Unitarian Universalist. Ah, he replied, with a twinkle in his eye, a heretic! At that point, I knew that I would like his class, and although I didn t quite understand what he meant at the time, it sounded like something cool, so I embraced it. That s right, I m a heretic! It was cool to be a heretic in It was not cool to be a heretic in In fact, it was a death sentence. Michael Servetus was born sometime between 1505 and 1511 no one knows exactly when. He grew up in an orthodox Roman Catholic family in the small Spanish town of Villanueva, in Aragon, and was precocious from an early age, so his father sent him to study law in France. He ended up as an assistant to a distinguished Franciscan scholar who was a chaplain and priest in the court of Charles I, king of Aragon, who would soon be crowned Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor. It was at Charles coronation in Italy that Servetus became disgusted with everything he saw of the Pope and the Catholic church, and he left the Emperor s court to go to Basel, Switzerland, and then to Strasbourg, where he published his first book, On the Errors of the Trinity. This book did not win him any friends among the Protestants, however. He followed up with a more conciliatory Dialogues on the Trinity, but although he softened his rhetoric, he had not softened his theological position. His books were confiscated and the Protestant towns began closing their doors to him. By this time, the Inquisition in Spain was showing interest in him, too, and he was summoned by his brother to return to his hometown. Terrified, he fled to Paris, went into hiding, and took on the name Michel de Villeneuve. This is where his life takes a turn for the cinematic. For over twenty years, he lived a double life. As Villeneuve, he studied medicine in Paris and became a well-respected doctor. By this time, he spoke Latin, Hebrew, Greek, French, Italian and Spanish. He edited books for several prestigious publishing houses, and in his study of medicine made a scientific discovery that was remarkable he described the pulmonary system for the first time. However, this medical discovery was buried within the theological writings that got him condemned for heresy, and so it went unnoticed at the time and it was another 75 years before anyone else figured it out. He was a true Renaissance humanist. He ended up in Lyon, working as the personal physician to the Archbishop. As far as anyone knew, he was Michel de Villeneuve, well respected around town and known for treating not only the wealthy but the poor alike. But in secret, as Michael Servetus, he was working on his major theological treatise, Christianismi Restitutio. He also began corresponding by letter with John Calvin.

4 Now, Calvin and Servetus had a history. Calvin had been living in Paris at the same time as Servetus, and they were both known in the underground reform theologian circles. I imagine it kind of like a fight club for theologians people would meet in secret and discuss ideas about things like baptism and whether or not people were predestined for salvation (Calvin said yes, Servetus said no). Although they never met in person, Calvin had challenged Servetus to meet him one night for a debate. Servetus was a no-show, and Calvin had never forgiven him. Twenty years later, Calvin had come to power in Geneva, and was one of the most powerful men of the Reformation. Servetus sent him the first draft of his book, Calvin replied calling Servetus all kinds of names, none of them kind, and the exchanges between the two of them got more and more heated. Finally, Calvin figured out where Servetus was living, and the name he was living under, and although the Catholic Church was Calvin s most hated enemy, he betrayed Servetus to the Inquisition. At first, no one would believe that the well-liked and respected physician Villeneuve was really the infamous heretic Servetus. It wasn t until Calvin sent them a portion of Servetus manuscript, written in his own hand, along with some of the letters that they had exchanged, that the authorities in France finally arrested Servetus and had him condemned to death. However, it wasn t to be the Catholics who killed him. He managed to escape his first imprisonment and flee. No one knows why Servetus tried to travel through Geneva to get to Italy. He was recognized there while attending a church service, in Calvin s own territory, and Calvin was finally was able to put him on trial, making up perhaps for the long-ago debate in Paris that never happened. Servetus was held for months in terrible conditions, denied clean clothes, fed rotting food, plagued by vermin, and allowed no visitors. This was not a trial in any sense that we would understand he could present no defense, but rather he was only held to give him an opportunity for him to recant, to admit that his writings had been heresy and that Calvin s beliefs were the only truth. He refused. As the Rev. Barbara Merritt describes, They clashed about the nature of God. For Servetus, God was gracious and expansive and accessible present in the individual soul. Servetus wrote, One soul is a certain light of God, a spark of the spirit of God, having an innate light of divinity. According to Servetus, God was to be found within and everywhere in the creation Contrast Servetus mysticism with Calvin s understanding of the Almighty. For John Calvin, God was distant, unapproachable, absolute sovereign and wholly other. God created human beings to be totally depraved born in original sin each soul had been either selected for salvation

5 (or condemned to everlasting hellfire and damnation) since before the creation began... The idea that God was close, loving and accessible drove Calvin round the bend. At the trial Calvin described himself screaming at Servetus. These are Calvin s own words: When Servetus asserted that all creatures are of the proper essence of God and so all things are full of gods (for he did not blush to speak and write his mind in this way) I, wounded with the indignity, objected: What, wretch! If one stamps the floor would one say that one stamped on your God? Does not such an absurdity shame you? But he answered, I have no doubt that this bench or anything you point to is God s substance. This is my fundamental principle that all things are a part and portion of God and the nature of things is the substantial spirit of God. 1 Instead of recanting, Servetus begged for religious tolerance, and he asked for mercy for his life. But there was no mercy in John Calvin. In the end, Servetus was condemned to be burned, a terrible and painful death, just outside the city walls. An eyewitness of the event describes how he held on to his convictions even unto the end, crying out as the torch was brought out, Jesus, son of the Eternal God, have pity on me!. The witness, said that if Servetus might have been spared if he had just changed one word, and said instead Jesus, Eternal Son of God. A Unitarian to the end. What strikes me about the story of Servetus, is the way in which he reminds us that we are not ever stuck between only two options. Life is not just a choice between A or B, this or that, Protestant or Catholic, Heaven or Hell. Once you are willing to be labeled a heretic, the world opens up. In Servetus age, everyone was persecuted. Power swung back and forth between the Catholics and the Protestants, violence raged between these two opposing forces. People thought they had to pick sides, to choose between the terror of the inquisition and the judgement of the reformers. Wars that were spawned between these competing ideologies raged for decades. And yet there was Servetus, showing that there was a third option, another path to take, a path that embraced tolerance and a religious vision that was humble, not infallible, and loving, not judgmental. His death did not go unnoticed. Although people may have disagreed with him, his bravery and his unwillingness to go against his conscience earned him respect and admiration, and Calvin was not prepared for the criticism that came his way. It seemed that this gruesome execution of someone for no crime other than an expression of conscience touched a nerve. 1

6 Sebastian Castellio, a scholar from the nearby town of Basel, wrote, To seek truth and to utter what one believes to be true can never be a crime. No one must be forced to accept a conviction. Conviction is free. 2 when Servetus fought with reasons and writings, he should have been repulsed by reasons and writings. He then published a book, titled Concerning Heretics, in which he wrote: What do we really mean by the term heretic? Whom are we entitled to call a heretic, without being unjust? I do not believe that all those termed heretics are really such. When I reflect on what a heretic really is, I can find no other criterion than that we are all heretics in the eyes of those who do not share our views. We can live together peacefully only when we control our intolerance [he wrote]. Even though there will always be differences of opinion from time to time, we can at any rate come to general understandings, can love one another, and can enter the bonds of peace. Although Calvin censored Castellio, and continued to persecute anyone who disagreed with him, he could not rid the world of the idea of tolerance. As Castellio declared, to kill a man is not to protect a doctrine; it is but to kill a man. If anything, Calvin s trials and execution of Servetus and the attempts to ban his writings only served to make him even more famous than he was in his life. Servetus works were republished underground, and his influence persisted for long after his death. Unitarianism and its attendant idea of religious tolerance took hold in Poland, and Transylvania, and migrated to England, and then flourished in the English colonies. I am proud to be part of a tradition of people, like Servetus, who found a third way, another way, a way between the violent clashes of any two armies, always seeking understanding and tolerance rather than righteousness and judgment. I am proud to be with the people who rejected orthodoxy, instead seeking out a life of heresy, of choices; people who asked, Isn t the world larger than any one of us can know, isn t God larger than that, isn t the human spirit larger than that? I do not think it was a coincidence that Servetus discovered the movement of breath and blood in the body at the same time that he was considering the movement of the Holy in the world. To him, it was all connected - all breath, all movement, all life, all God, flowing within the world, animating us and inspiring us and connecting us. And if all life was infused with the holy, it was not, and could never be anything but good. 2

7 Sources for this Sermon: Out of the Flames: The Remarkable Story of a Fearless Scholar, a Fatal Heresy, and One of the Rarest Books in the World by Lawrence Goldstone and Nancy Bazelon Goldstone A Heretics Welcome, a sermon by the Rev. Barbara Merritt, 2008 Unitarianism Begins I: Michael Servetus and Unitarian Begins II: Sebastian Castellio, essays by the Rev. Frank Schulman, 2003 Servetus: Our 16 th Century Contemporary by the International Association for Religious Freedom, 2011