Justified True Belief

(●) A Spanish physician who denied that God is three persons, traced the blood’s road through the lungs, and was burned alive by Protestants at Geneva. + Most people who have heard of Michael Servetus have heard one sentence about him: John Calvin had him burned. The sentence is roughly true and it is nowhere near the whole story, and the parts it leaves out are the interesting ones. Servetus was a lawyer’s student who became a geographer, then a proofreader, then a physician, and all the while a theologian who thought the central doctrine of Christendom was a mistake made by men who read Greek philosophy into the Bible. He published that opinion at about the age of twenty and spent the rest of his life hiding from what he had said. He is on a Christian apologetics site for two reasons. The first is that he is the strongest sixteenth-century test case for the doctrine of the Trinity: he knew Scripture in Hebrew, Greek and Latin, he pressed the one question that every trinitarian has to answer (where does the Bible actually say that the Son existed before he was born?), and the answers given to him are still the answers given today. The second reason is harder. His death was the moment when Protestant Europe had to decide whether the gospel permits the burning of men who get God wrong, and the argument that started at his stake is the reason no Christian church anywhere now claims that right. One fact about him a reader will remember. His great book, the Christianismi Restitutio, contains the first description in Europe of how blood travels from the right side of the heart through the lungs and back to the left. It is not in a chapter on medicine. It is buried inside a chapter about the Holy Spirit, because Servetus was trying to work out where the breath of God meets the body of a man. Nearly every copy of the book was burned with its author, and the discovery lay unread for a hundred and forty-one years. One more thing, and it is a small oddity worth knowing before the story starts: the man could not keep his own birthday straight. At his trial in Vienne in the spring of 1553 he said he was a native of Tudela in Navarre and forty-two years old, which puts his birth in 1511. Four months later at Geneva, facing men who knew him and with nothing left to conceal, he said he was of Villanueva in Aragon and forty-four, which puts it in 1509. The Geneva sentence names him "Michael Servetus of Villanova, in the Kingdom of Aragon," and every book he edited he signed Villanovanus, after that town, so the place is reasonably settled even though the year is not. The day usually printed for his birth, 29 September 1511, comes from later tradition rather than from any record made in his lifetime, and no baptismal register survives to settle it. Scholars settle on the convention "c. 1511." Every age given for him is therefore an inference from one of his own two statements, not a fact read off a register.

(●) c. 1511 AD: Born in Aragon, in a year and a town he himself reported two different ways. + He came from the kind of family that owns land without being noble and reads Latin without being clerical. Asked at Geneva about his parents, he said they were "d’ancienne race, vivants noblement," of old stock and living independently; his father was a notary, a man who drew up other people’s contracts and wills. That is the whole of what we know about the house he grew up in. The Spain of his boyhood is easier to see than his family is. He was born less than twenty years after 1492, the year Granada fell and the Jews of Spain were expelled, and he grew up in a country where thousands of families had been baptized under duress and were now watched to see whether the baptism had taken. A boy in Aragon in 1520 knew what it looked like when the state decided what a man must believe. He also knew, as almost nobody in northern Europe did, what Jews and Muslims actually say about the Christian God: that he is one, that he does not beget, and that three-in-one sounds to them like three. Servetus never forgot that objection, and it drives his first book from the opening page. He went to the University of Toulouse to read law, probably in 1528, and there, on the account his biographers give, he did the thing that changed his life. He read a complete Bible. That was not ordinary. A law student of his day met Scripture in fragments, quoted in a lecture or read aloud at Mass, and the whole book in one binding was expensive and, in some places, suspect. Servetus read it through, and what struck him was not what was in it but what was missing: the word "Trinity" is not there, the word "person" is not used of God, and the machinery of the creeds he had been taught is nowhere to be found in it.

(●) 1530 AD: At about nineteen he rode in an emperor’s train and watched a pope carried above a kneeling crowd. + He took service as secretary to Juan de Quintana, a Franciscan friar who had just been made confessor to the Emperor Charles V. It was a superb appointment for a young man: the confessor sat at the emperor’s ear and had a seat in the council chamber, and his secretary went where he went. Where he went, in February 1530, was Bologna, for the coronation of Charles by Pope Clement VII. Servetus stood in that crowd and watched. He saw the pope, he wrote afterwards, "borne aloft above the heads of the people, the multitude kneeling in the dust, adoring him, and they among them who could but kiss his slipper accounting themselves blessed." He saw something else that stayed with him longer: "the most powerful prince of his age, at the head of twenty thousand veteran soldiers, kneeling and kissing the feet of the Pope." Indulgences, the paper remissions of punishment in purgatory that had set Luther off thirteen years earlier, were on sale in the streets at prices to suit every purse. Whatever had been forming in him since Toulouse hardened there. From Bologna the imperial party went north to the Diet of Augsburg in the summer of 1530, the assembly at which the Lutheran princes presented their confession of faith, and there the young secretary very likely saw Philip Melanchthon at close range. By the autumn he was out of Quintana’s service, probably let go on suspicion of heresy. He went to Basel and lodged for a while with Johannes Oecolampadius, the reformer of that city, who found his guest exhausting and wrote to Zwingli about him; then to Strasbourg, to Martin Bucer and Wolfgang Capito. He was asking all of them the same question, and none of their answers satisfied him.

(●) 1531 AD: At about twenty he published a book against the Trinity, and every reformer in Europe answered it. + The book was De Trinitatis Erroribus libri septem, seven books on the errors of the Trinity. Johann Setzer printed it at Hagenau in Alsace, and the title page carried the author’s name in full, "per Michaelem Serveto, alias Reves ab Aragonia Hispanum." Reves was the second name his father’s family carried at home, where the notary who raised him signed himself Antonio Serveto alias Revés. The printer was more careful than the author: no press, no publisher and no place of printing appear anywhere in the volume, and for twenty-two years nobody outside a small circle knew where it had come from. The truth only emerged at his trial. By July 1531 it was for sale in Strasbourg, Frankfurt and Basel, and the reaction was immediate and nearly unanimous. Oecolampadius wrote to Bucer on 5 August that friends who had seen it "were beyond measure offended," asked him to assure Luther that it had not been printed at Basel, and warned that its author "disputes the coeternity and consubstantiality of the Father and the Son." Those two long words name the two things the creeds insist on: that the Son has existed for exactly as long as the Father has, which is to say always, and that the Son is of the very same being as the Father rather than a lesser thing that resembles him. Servetus denied both, and everyone who read him saw it at once. Bucer, a mild man by the standards of the age, denounced the book from the pulpit at Strasbourg and is said to have declared its writer deserved to be torn in pieces. Luther, in his table talk of 1532, called it "ein greulich bös Buch," a horribly wicked book, and then admitted something striking: he too had been troubled by doubts on the subject, and had put them down as the devil’s work rather than reason with them. The Basel senate banned the sale. Melanchthon was the exception, and his reaction is the one worth noticing. "Servetum multum lego," he wrote to a friend, I am reading Servetus a great deal. To another, the scholar Joachim Camerarius, he wrote that he found the Spaniard sharp rather than deep, and then added: "you know, I have always feared that serious difficulties would one day arise" about the Trinity. "Good God! to what tragedies will not these questions give occasion in times to come." He was writing in the early 1530s, twenty years before the fire at Champel, the hill outside Geneva where the tragedy he feared finally came. Servetus answered the storm the following year with Dialogorum de Trinitate libri duo, two dialogues on the Trinity, again from Setzer’s press at Hagenau. He retracted the tone of the first book and none of its substance. Then he disappeared.

(●) 1532 AD: He vanished into France as Michel de Villeneuve and spent twenty years correcting proofs and practising medicine. + The new name was the old one in French: Villeneuve, new town, after Villanueva. Under it he lived openly in France for two decades without anyone connecting him to the hunted Spaniard, which tells you something about how thin the police of the sixteenth century were and something about how completely he changed his subject. At Lyon he became a corrector for the press of the brothers Trechsel, the man who reads proofs and checks the scholarship, and he turned out to be extraordinary at it. His edition of Ptolemy’s Geography (Lyon, 1535) went back to the Greek, corrected the received Latin, and added notes of his own on the countries of Europe. He was the working editor of a large Latin Bible as well, the translation by Santes Pagnini published at Lyon in 1542, for which he wrote the prefaces and the marginal notes. From Lyon he went on to Paris to study medicine, and there he assisted Johann Guinter of Andernach in the dissecting room. Guinter named his two best assistants in print, saying that he had been helped "first by Andrea Vesalius, a young man, by Hercules! singularly proficient in anatomy," and "after him by Michael Villanovanus, distinguished by his literary acquirements of every kind." Vesalius would go on to write the book that founded modern anatomy. That is the company Servetus was keeping, and it is where he learned to read a body. He was not a cautious man even in disguise. He lectured at Paris on judicial astrology, the art of reading a man’s future in the stars, which the medical faculty regarded as quackery and the theologians as worse; they took him to court, and in 1538 he answered with a pamphlet defending the practice. He lost, and losing cost him the city. He went off to the small town of Charlieu to practise quietly, and around 1540 he moved again, to Vienne on the Rhône.

(●) 1540 AD: He settled at Vienne as the archbishop’s physician and began writing to Calvin under the false name. + Pierre Palmier, Archbishop of Vienne, had heard him lecture in Paris and liked him. He gave the doctor a house near the cathedral and his own custom, and for more than a decade Michel de Villeneuve was a prosperous and respected physician in a Catholic city, treating the clergy who would later try him. He had money in his purse and a reputation to lose, and he risked both on his letters. The letters went to John Calvin at Geneva, carried by Jean Frellon, a bookseller of Lyon who knew them both. Servetus wrote a long series of them, and thirty went into his own book years later. They are not the letters of a man seeking a quarrel at first; they are the letters of a man who believes he has seen something and cannot understand why the ablest theologian of his generation will not look. He pressed three points again and again: that Christ is the Son of God as a man born of Mary and not as an eternal Word, that regeneration comes through baptism received in adulthood, and that Calvin should submit to being baptized again himself. Regeneration is the old word for the new birth, the moment a person passes from death to life in God, and where a man puts that moment decides a great deal else about him. He sent Calvin a manuscript draft of the book he was writing. Calvin sent him back a copy of the Institutes, his own great summary of Christian doctrine and the most admired book in Protestant Europe, and it returned to Geneva with objections written in the margins, which is not a thing Calvin was used to. By February 1546 Calvin had had enough. Writing to his friend William Farel on the thirteenth of that month, he described the manuscript and the offer that came with it, that Servetus would visit Geneva if Calvin approved, and then wrote the sentence that has hung over his name ever since: "I will not pledge my faith to him; for did he come, if I have any authority here, I should never suffer him to go away alive." The letter survives. Seven years later Servetus came.

(●) January 1553 AD: He printed his life’s book in secret, and buried in it a discovery no European had made. + He had tried Basel first, and the publisher there read the manuscript and refused it in April 1552 in a frightened and friendly letter. So he did it at home. Balthasar Arnoullet, a bookseller of Vienne, and Guillaume Guéroult, who ran his press, agreed to take the work on for the whole cost of the printing plus a gratuity of a hundred crowns, the author paying. Then they did it quietly. They rented a small house away from the known shop, set up cases and a press inside it, and printed for three or four months with as few hands as the job allowed. A thousand copies came off, packed in bales of a hundred. There was no author’s name and no place of printing, only three initials on the last leaf over the date: M.S.V. The title was Christianismi Restitutio, the restoration of Christianity, and it was a deliberate answer to the most famous book of the age, Calvin’s Institutio. Seven hundred and thirty-four pages: a reworking of the Trinity in five books, then faith and justification, then regeneration and the reign of Antichrist, then the thirty letters to Calvin printed in full, then a catalogue of sixty signs that Antichrist was reigning already, and at the end an appeal to Melanchthon. Inside the fifth book, the one on the Holy Spirit, is the passage that made him famous in a field he was not writing about. He wanted to know where God’s breath enters a man. Scripture told him the life is in the blood and that God breathed life into the first man’s nostrils, so he went looking for the place where air and blood meet. He found it, and in finding it he contradicted Galen, the second-century Greek physician whose word had been law in European medicine for thirteen hundred years, on how blood crosses from one side of the heart to the other (T5).

(●) 27 October 1553 AD: Condemned at Vienne and then at Geneva, he was burned alive on the hill at Champel. + The denunciation came from Geneva. Guillaume de Trie, a Frenchman living there and known to Calvin, wrote to his Catholic cousin Antoine Arneys at Lyon expressing astonishment that a heretic of this kind lived unmolested at Vienne, and enclosed printed leaves of the new book. The Inquisitor Matthieu Ory pronounced them heretical, and on 16 March 1553 the authorities of Vienne searched the physician’s lodgings and found nothing. Arneys was told to write again and ask for proof. What came back, at the third request, were more than twenty of Servetus’ own letters to Calvin in his own hand. Calvin had kept them, and he supplied them; he said afterwards that he had been reluctant, and the letters went all the same. Servetus was arrested at Vienne on 4 April, examined twice, and on the morning of 7 April he asked the gaoler for the key to the prison garden, left his velvet cap and dressing gown at the foot of a tree, and went over the wall in his travelling clothes. On 17 June the court condemned him in absentia, which is to say with the prisoner long gone and the dock empty, to be burned alive by a slow fire, and it burned his effigy that same day along with five bales of his book. He wandered for four months. He meant to reach Naples, where a large Spanish community would need a doctor, and his road to Italy took him through Geneva. He arrived in the summer and lay low at an inn called the Rose, waiting for a boat up the lake toward Zurich. On Sunday 13 August, tired of the room and, as his enemies and his friends both report, a genuinely devout man, he went to the evening service at a nearby church. He was recognized. Calvin was told within the hour and demanded his arrest, and the officers took him from the inn to the town jail. The trial ran from August into October, and it was as much a fight between Calvin and his political opponents in Geneva as it was a heresy case; the councils consulted the other Swiss churches, and all of them answered that the man should be condemned. On 26 October the council passed sentence. On 27 October, an hour before noon, he was taken to the hill at Champel, chained to a stake with his manuscript and a printed copy of the Restitutio bound at his waist, and a chaplet of straw and brimstone, which is to say a wreath of it, set on his head. The wood was green, which is the detail that turns a sentence of death into a cruelty, because green wood smoulders instead of catching. It took something over half an hour. Farel, who walked beside him the whole way trying to get a recantation, records that he would not say Christ was the eternal Son of God, and asked Farel instead to show him one place in Scripture where Christ is called the Son of God before his birth. Immediately before he died he cried out: "O God, save my soul; O Jesu, Son of the eternal God, have compassion upon me!" Read that cry slowly, because one word in it is the whole quarrel. The church said eternal Son of God. Servetus said Son of the eternal God, and the difference is where the adjective sits: on his lips it is the Father who is eternal, and the Son is the man who was born. Farel had spent the whole walk asking him to move that one word. He would not move it, and he was burning.

What He Taught

(T1) The word Trinity is nowhere in Scripture, and the three persons of the schools are three phantoms. + Think of a word you learned from a teacher rather than from a book, and then imagine going back to the book and finding it is not there. That is roughly what happened to Servetus at Toulouse, and he never got over it. Some vocabulary first, because the whole quarrel turns on one word, and on what the schools had made of it. The schools, when a sixteenth-century writer says "the schools," are the medieval universities and the theologians trained in them, who worked doctrine out in Latin with the tools of Greek philosophy. The creeds say that God is one being in three persons. "Person" translates the Greek hypostasis, and the older Latin word behind the English is persona, which originally meant the mask an actor held in front of his face on stage. By the fourth century the church had decided the word meant something much stronger than a mask: a real distinct someone, so that the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit are each fully God and are not each other, while God remains one. Servetus thought the word had been smuggled in from the theatre and the philosophy lecture room and then quietly promoted, and he thought the promotion was the error. Here is the shape of his complaint. Take away the word "person" and read only what the Bible actually says, and you are left with one God who makes himself known in various ways. Servetus was content with that much and said so: there are, he wrote, "three admirable dispositions in God, in each of which divinity appears." The technical name for this kind of view is modalism, the idea that Father, Son and Spirit are three ways the one God shows himself rather than three who are eternally distinct, as one man can be a son, a husband and a father without being three men. Keep that picture in mind, because it is the whole of what Servetus would concede. He was willing to go on using the word "person" if it meant no more than one of those three showings. He was not willing to use it in the church’s sense, three who are each fully God and are not each other, and when he said so he said it with a hammer. To believe in three distinct persons in the one essence of God, he wrote, was to have "a God parted into three, like the three-headed Cerberus of the heathen poets." Cerberus was the dog that guarded the gate of hell in Greek myth. The line was read out against him at Geneva, among the articles of accusation. He had a practical argument too, and it is the one modern readers meet most often. The doctrine, he said, was the single greatest obstacle to the spread of Christ’s religion, because it made the faith unacceptable in advance to the two peoples who already worshipped the God of Abraham. A Jew who has recited the daily confession of Israel, "The Lord our God, the Lord is one" (Deuteronomy 6:4), every day of his life hears three and stops listening; so, he said, does a Muslim. Coming from Aragon, he had watched both conversations up close.

(Q) "It were well, indeed, that all distinction of persons in the one God were henceforth abandoned and rooted out of the minds of men." + Source: De Trinitatis Erroribus, folio 64b (Robert Willis translation, 1877). It comes in the middle of his case that the word "person" was borrowed from philosophy and never meant in Scripture what the schools made it mean. A few lines later, on the same leaf, he offers his own substitute: three dispositions in God, in each of which divinity appears.

(T2) The Son of God is the man Jesus, born of Mary; the Word was never a son. + This is the claim he died for, and it is worth stating exactly, because it is easy to make him say less than he did. Servetus was not one of those later radicals who thought Jesus an inspired teacher and nothing more. He believed Jesus was divine, prayed to him, and called him God. What he denied is that there was a Son before there was a baby. His proof text was the annunciation, the scene in Luke where the angel Gabriel comes to a young woman in Nazareth and tells her she is going to have a child. The angel tells Mary that the Holy Spirit will come upon her, "therefore the child to be born will be called holy—the Son of God" (Luke 1:35). Read that as it stands, Servetus said, and the title "Son of God" attaches to the thing conceived in the womb. It is given because of the conception, not in spite of it. So the man Jesus is the Son of God, engendered in Mary by God directly and not by Joseph, and no eternal second person is needed to explain the verse or is mentioned in it. That leaves him with a question he has to answer, and he knew it. What, then, is the Word of John’s prologue, the famous opening lines of the fourth Gospel that begin "In the beginning was the Word"? God’s own speech, said Servetus: God uttering himself, the way light came when God spoke. Not a someone, but God himself in the act of making himself known, who in the fullness of time brought forth Christ. On that reading the Word is not a son and never was, and the whole trinitarian scheme rests on a misreading of the incarnation. "All the Trinitarian errors," he concluded, "have arisen from not understanding the true nature of the Incarnation." The historic doctrine he was denying has a name worth knowing: eternal generation. It says the Son is begotten of the Father with no beginning at all, the way a light source is never for one instant without its shining. The Father was never without the Son. That is what the creed means by "begotten, not made," and it is exactly what Servetus said could not be found anywhere in Scripture. Farel, walking him to the stake, could not get him to say the words "eternal Son of God," and reported that Servetus asked him instead to name a single verse in which Christ is called the Son of God before his birth. It is a fair question and it has an answer, which John’s prologue supplies, and so does the high priestly prayer, the long prayer Jesus prays for his disciples on the last night in John 17. It is also a real question, asked by a man who had read the book in three languages, and the men around him were in too much of a hurry to treat it as one.

(Q) "They therefore plainly err who speak of the Word as the Son of God: the man Jesus was the Son of God, not the Word." + Source: De Trinitatis Erroribus, folio 62 (Robert Willis translation, 1877). He has just walked through the annunciation and the naming of Jesus at his circumcision, and this is the conclusion he draws from them: the sonship belongs to the man who was born, and to nothing before him.

(T3) The Holy Spirit is God communicating himself, not a third someone standing beside him. + Open a Hebrew Bible at almost any page and you will meet the word ruach. It means wind, and it means breath, and it means spirit, and the same three letters do all three jobs; in Genesis the ruach of God hovers over the waters, and in Ezekiel the ruach blows into dry bones and they stand up. Servetus made a great deal of this. The Bible, he said, uses "spirit" for an angel here, for a man’s own soul there, and for plain moving air somewhere else, and nowhere does it introduce a third distinct somebody alongside the Father and the Son. His own account is a matched pair. God is hidden in himself. He makes himself known by the Word, and he gives himself by the Spirit, and the two go together always. Manifestation and communication: those are his terms, and the Spirit is the second of them. Think of a man speaking to someone he loves. The words carry what he means, and the warmth of his breath in the room is not a second man. He was not alone in feeling the difficulty, and this is where the story becomes uncomfortable for his judges. Melanchthon’s own first edition of the Loci Communes, the founding textbook of Lutheran theology, published in 1521 when its author was twenty-four, declined to treat the Trinity as a topic at all, on the stated ground that the mysteries of God are better adored than investigated; and where that book does speak of the third person, it says that the Holy Spirit is nothing other than the living will and movement of God. That is not far from what Servetus was saying. What Melanchthon did with the resemblance is its own small tragedy. He filled the gap in the editions from 1535 onward, where the doctrine Servetus had attacked is set out at length and called necessary to salvation. In private he admitted that he had always feared these questions would break out one day. And in October 1554, a year after Champel, he sent Calvin his congratulations. Where the church parts company is not over the word ruach, which means all the things Servetus said it means. It is over what the New Testament then does. Peter asks Ananias why Satan has filled his heart "to lie to the Holy Spirit," and in the next breath says "You have not lied to man but to God" (Acts 5:3–4). You can lie to a person. Nobody lies to a breeze.

(Q) "As the essence of God is the Word, in so far as manifestation is made in the world, so, and in so far as communication is made, it is Spirit; manifestation and communication, however, being ever co-ordinate and conjoined." + Source: Christianismi Restitutio, p. 163, opening the fifth book, on the Holy Spirit (Robert Willis translation, 1877). It is dense, and it is the hinge of the whole book. Everything that follows in that fifth book, including the anatomy (T5), is Servetus trying to trace how God gives himself to a creature made of dust.

(T4) Baptism belongs to grown men and women, at the age Christ himself was baptized. + The Anabaptists of his century (the name means "rebaptizers," and it was an insult before it was a label) held that baptism follows faith, so that a person baptized as an infant has not been baptized at all and must be baptized as a believer. Thousands were drowned and burned for it by Catholics and Protestants alike. Servetus agreed with them and then went past them, and the place he went is his own. His argument runs on the life of Christ. Jesus was circumcised as an infant, at eight days, in obedience to the law of Moses. He was not baptized until he came to the Jordan at about thirty. Servetus took that gap to be deliberate and instructive: circumcision was the sign for a child, baptism is the sign for a grown man, and the age at which the Lord received it is the age at which a disciple should receive it. He held that no one under thirty is a fit recipient, and he seems to have arranged his own life accordingly. Count forward from the earlier of the two birth years he gave, 1509, and he turned thirty in 1539, the year he was living quietly at Charlieu. From the very detailed description he gives of how the rite ought to be performed, his biographers reckon that he had himself baptized privately that year by some Anabaptist he had found. He then spent years urging Calvin, who was almost exactly his own age, to do the same. On infant baptism itself he had no restraint left at all. Paedobaptism, the baptism of infants, he called "a detestable abomination, an extinction of the Holy Spirit in the soul of man, a dissolution of the Church of Christ," and he finished with the prophets’ own cadence: "Woe to you, ye baptizers of infancy, for ye close the kingdom of heaven against mankind." And yet the same pages carry his gentlest sentences. He refused flatly to say that an infant who dies unbaptized is lost. "The little children whom Christ blessed were not baptized. How should the most clement and merciful Lord condemn those who had never sinned? How should he curse those he blessed?" Then the line that gives away how his mind worked: "They seem to me to attempt to befool me who say that the salvation of an unconscious infant depends on my will to baptize or to leave it unbaptized." He would not let a priest’s decision stand between a baby and God. That instinct is the best thing in him, and it is the same instinct that made him impossible to live with.

(Q) "Christ, as an infant, was circumcised, but not baptized; and this is a great mystery; in his thirtieth year, however, he received baptism; thereby setting us the example, and teaching us that before this age no one is a fit recipient of the rite that gives the kingdom of heaven to man." + Source: Christianismi Restitutio, Epistle XV to John Calvin, p. 615 (Robert Willis translation, 1877). The letter goes on to urge Calvin to be baptized himself. Servetus published all thirty letters in his own book, which meant that when the Vienne inquisitors and then the Geneva court wanted evidence of what he believed, he had already printed it for them.

(T5) The breath of life travels in the blood, and the blood reaches the heart by way of the lungs. + Anyone who has cut a finger and then given blood knows two facts that do not obviously fit together. Blood from a vein is dark, almost purple. Blood from an artery is bright red. Something happens to it in between, and for thirteen centuries European medicine had Galen’s answer to what that something was. Galen taught that blood is made in the liver, that some of it reaches the right lower chamber of the heart, and that it then seeps across the thick muscular wall between the two lower chambers, the septum, through pores too small to see. In the left chamber it meets air drawn in from the lungs, is refined into what he called vital spirit, and goes out bright through the arteries. Nobody had ever found the pores. Everybody assumed they were there, because Galen said so. Servetus came at the question from the other end, and this is the part that makes him unlike any other figure in the history of physiology. He was not asking how the body works. He was asking where God touches it. Scripture had told him that God "breathed into his nostrils the breath of life" (Genesis 2:7), and that "the life of the flesh is in the blood" (Leviticus 17:11). Put the two together and there must be a place in the body where the breath God gives meets the blood that carries life, and if the soul is anywhere it is there. So he went looking for it, with what he had learned in Guinter’s dissecting room in Paris. What he found was the answer. The blood does not seep through the wall of the heart at all. It takes the long way round: out of the right chamber into the pulmonary artery, which is the big vessel running from the heart out to the lungs, then through the lungs themselves, where it mixes with the breathed air and turns crimson, and home again by the pulmonary vein into the left chamber. Pulmonary simply means "of the lungs." He argued the whole circuit from evidence rather than from authority, and the evidence is good. For one thing, the pulmonary artery is far too large to be feeding the lungs alone, which is all Galen’s scheme gave it to do. For another, the unborn child’s lungs are nourished from elsewhere, so the flood of blood that pours into them at the moment of birth has to be for something else. And what comes back out of the lungs is not air but air mingled with blood. As for the famous pores in the septum, he wrote, it "is without vessels and special properties" and is not fitted for the job. He was right, six years before Realdo Colombo published the same finding from his chair at Rome and seventy-five before William Harvey traced the whole circulation of the blood. It bought him nothing. The book was burned, the passage was lost with it, and nobody in medicine read it until 1694, when William Wotton printed the extract in London from one of the copies that had escaped the fire. Honesty adds one more name, and it is not a European one. Ibn al-Nafis, born near Damascus and practising in Cairo, had described the same circuit around 1242, three centuries before Servetus, in a commentary on the Persian physician Avicenna. No one in Europe knew about it until a manuscript of it turned up in Berlin in 1924.

(Q) "This communication, however, does not take place through the septum, partition or midwall of the heart, as commonly believed, but by another admirable contrivance, the blood being transmitted from the pulmonary artery to the pulmonary vein, by a lengthened passage through the lungs, in the course of which it is elaborated and becomes of a crimson colour." + Source: Christianismi Restitutio, book five, on the Holy Spirit, pp. 169–170 (Robert Willis translation, 1877). "Elaborated" is the old word for refined or worked up. The sentence sits a few lines after a discussion of what God breathed into Adam, and a few lines before a return to the doctrine of the Spirit. Servetus never treated it as a separate subject, and that is precisely why it went unread.

(Q) "Wherefore, my Lords, I demand that my false accuser be declared subject to the law of retaliation, and like me be sent to prison until the cause between him and me, for death or other penalty, is decided." + Source: petition to the Council of Geneva from his prison cell, 22 September 1553 (Robert Willis translation, 1877). The petition ends: "My Lords, I demand of you, justice, justice, justice!" The law of retaliation is the old principle that a false accuser suffers the penalty his accusation would have brought on the accused. So what he is asking the court for is this: jail Nicolas de la Fontaine, Calvin’s secretary, in whose name the prosecution had been begun, and Calvin behind him, and then decide which of the two of us deserves to die. He is not asking to be let alone to believe what he likes. He is asking to win.

What Christian Thinkers Made of Him

(†) The reformers answered his book almost to a man, and then his death divided them. + On the doctrine there was very little argument. Oecolampadius at Basel, Bucer at Strasbourg, Luther at Wittenberg, Melanchthon, Bullinger at Zurich and Calvin at Geneva all read him and all rejected him, and the Catholic authorities of Vienne condemned him first and by a shorter route. When the Geneva council, during the trial, wrote to the churches of Zurich, Bern, Basel and Schaffhausen for advice, every one of them replied that the man should be condemned. The burning, then, was not a Genevan eccentricity. Death by fire for obstinate heresy was the settled law of Christendom, east and west, Catholic and Protestant alike, and Servetus had already been sentenced to exactly that death by a Catholic court four months earlier and had only escaped it by climbing a wall. That is an explanation of how it happened. It is not a defence, and none of the men involved would have been helped by one. Calvin defended the execution in print the next year, in the Defensio orthodoxae fidei de sacra Trinitate of 1554, arguing that the magistrate bears the sword for the honour of God as well as for the peace of the streets. Melanchthon, who twenty years earlier had been reading Servetus "a great deal" and worrying aloud about what tragedies these questions would cause, wrote to Calvin in October 1554: "I have read your able refutation of the horrible blasphemies of the Spaniard; and for the conclusion attained give thanks to the Son of God who was umpire in your contest. The Church, too, both of the day and of the future, owes you thanks, and will surely prove itself grateful." The church of the future did not, and that was clear within months.

(†) His pyre became the case that Christians used against pyres. + Sebastian Castellio had been Calvin’s colleague at Geneva and had left after a falling-out; by 1553 he was teaching Greek at Basel and was poor. In March 1554 a small book appeared with a false imprint under the name Martinus Bellius: De haereticis, an sint persequendi, on heretics, whether they are to be persecuted. Castellio compiled it, and the method was devastating. He simply gathered what Christian teachers had said against religious killing, ancient and modern, and included passages from Calvin’s own earlier writings. His text was Paul: "just as at that time he who was born according to the flesh persecuted him who was born according to the Spirit, so also it is now" (Galatians 4:29). Calvin called the book a farrago, a medley, which is what you call a book that has hit you. Castellio wrote a second and sharper reply, Contra libellum Calvini, in the summer of 1554. No one would print it in his lifetime; it waited until 1612. In its seventy-seventh article stands the sentence that outlived everyone in this story: "To kill a man is not to defend a doctrine, it is to kill a man. When the Genevans killed Servetus, they did not defend a doctrine, they killed a man." He was not arguing from sentiment but from the Gospels, and two passages carried most of the weight. When the servants offer to pull up the weeds sown among the wheat, the master says no: "Let both grow together until the harvest" (Matthew 13:30), because the sorting is God’s work and God’s timing, and men pulling weeds pull wheat. And when James and John ask whether they should call down fire on a village that would not receive Jesus, "he turned and rebuked them" (Luke 9:55). Castellio lost the argument in his lifetime and died poor in 1563. He won it afterwards, completely. The last word on this belongs to Calvin’s own heirs. In 1903 a group of Genevans raised a stone on the hill at Champel, on the spot, and cut this into it: "Respectful and grateful sons of Calvin, our great Reformer, but condemning an error which was that of his century, and firmly attached to liberty of conscience according to the true principles of the Reformation and of the Gospel, we have erected this expiatory monument." Expiatory is the word to notice. It means raised to make amends for something, which is a strange thing to carve on a monument to your own tradition, and they carved it anyway. The date on the stone is 27 October 1903, three hundred and fifty years to the day. It is still there, and it is one of the more honest things one church has ever said about another man’s death.

(†) The medicine was recovered a century and a half later, and the theology travelled a different road. + Of the thousand copies printed at Vienne, three are known to survive: one in Paris, one in Vienna and one at Edinburgh, and the Edinburgh copy has lost its first sixteen leaves, replaced long ago by a handwritten transcript. The Paris copy is the one the advocate Germain Colladon used for the prosecution at Geneva, with the incriminating passages marked; it passed to England, where the London physician Richard Mead owned it and wrote a note at its head recording whose it had been, and it came back to France in the century after that. Three copies out of a thousand, in other words, were enough. A book can be burned almost out of existence and still, in the end, get its author his due, though in this case getting it took a hundred and forty-one years. The theology is a more tangled story, and it is easy to tell it too simply. Servetus is often called the father of Unitarianism, the movement that came to hold that God is one person and not three, and the honest version of that claim is a good deal narrower. His books were destroyed so thoroughly that Castellio, writing in Basel within a year of the execution, complained that he could not get hold of one to see what the man had actually said. What travelled was the reputation and the memory of the fire. Italian anti-trinitarians who had to leave Italy carried both to Poland and Transylvania, where the anti-trinitarian congregations organized themselves as the Minor Reformed Church and where Faustus Socinus became the systematic thinker the movement had lacked. From Poland the ideas reached England and, much later, New England. But Socinus is not Servetus, and the difference matters. Socinus denied that Christ existed at all before his birth, and he denied that Christ’s death paid anything on a sinner’s behalf, whereas Servetus held to a Christ who is God made visible and who is rightly worshipped. Neither man would have signed the other’s book. What genuinely descends from Servetus is a question rather than a system, and the question is the one he put to Farel on the way to the stake.

(†) Where the gospel parts company with him: the eternal Son, the personal Spirit, and the way he argued. + He asked Farel for one verse, and he asked it in earnest, so he deserves a straight answer rather than the one he got. Here is the answer, and with it three other places where what he taught and how he taught it cannot be let stand. - The Son before the manger. Servetus wanted a text calling Christ the Son of God before his birth. One verse comes very close to his own terms: "But when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his Son, born of woman" (Galatians 4:4), where the sending stands first in the sentence and the birth second. The question underneath his demand is then answered over and over. John opens: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God" (John 1:1), and "All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made" (John 1:3), and then identifies that Word with the one who "became flesh and dwelt among us" and whose glory is "glory as of the only Son from the Father" (John 1:14). Jesus himself says "before Abraham was, I am" (John 8:58), and prays to be glorified "with the glory that I had with you before the world existed" (John 17:5). Servetus was right that the exact phrase he demanded is not there. He was wrong that its absence settles anything, because the thing the phrase would say is asserted on almost every page of John. - The Spirit you can grieve. If the Holy Spirit were only God’s breath and motion, whole sentences of the New Testament would be unintelligible. Peter tells Ananias he has lied "to the Holy Spirit" and then that he has "not lied to man but to God" (Acts 5:3–4). Jesus commands baptism "in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit" (Matthew 28:19), one name for three, which is either the doctrine or an accident of grammar that the church has never been able to explain away. - Baptism, and the rule he added to it. Whether infants should be baptized is a question on which serious Christians have differed since long before Servetus and still do; Baptist and Anabaptist believers withhold baptism from infants for reasons drawn from the same Scriptures their opponents use, and calling that position "a detestable abomination" was Servetus’ own heat rather than anyone’s argument. What is his alone, and what no one else has ever defended, is the rule that nobody under thirty may be baptized at all. Nothing in the New Testament sets an age. The Philippian jailer "was baptized at once, he and all his family" (Acts 16:33), on the night he believed, and nobody asks him how old anyone is. - The manner of it. He called the Trinity a three-headed dog of hell, and he called Melanchthon a Belial and a Satan, which is to say a devil twice over, Belial being an old biblical name for the devil. None of that is an argument, and all of it is a large part of the reason a man with a real question discovered that nobody would sit down and answer it. And there is one more entry that his admirers tend to leave out. From his cell he demanded that his accuser be handed over to the law of retaliation and imprisoned until it was settled which of them should die, in his petition of 22 September 1553. He was not pleading for liberty of conscience. He was asking the same court, under the same law, for the verdict to fall the other way. None of that makes the fire anything but wicked. Paul’s instruction is not ambiguous: "the Lord’s servant must not be quarrelsome but kind to everyone, able to teach, patiently enduring evil, correcting his opponents with gentleness" (2 Timothy 2:24–25). Servetus failed that standard and so did every man who put him on the pile, and only one of the two parties had the power to kill.