"Burning Passion"

The Rev. Suzanne Meyer

On October 27, 1553, four hundred and fifty years ago this week, if you and I had been among the crowd of onlookers standing in front of the town hall in Geneva, Switzerland, here is what we would have witnessed. It must have been an amazing and terrifying sight. This is the account of those events as related by Lawrence and Nancy Goldstone in their book Out of the Flames:

A procession began at the town hall. At its head were the local dignitaries—magistrates in their robes and hats, members of the town council, clergymen in their gowns, and the chief of police. Immediately behind them rode a wave of officers on horseback and a guard of mounted archers. Next came the citizens of the city, first the well-to-do burghers, then the tradespeople and the artisans, and finally a mob of the city's lower classes. Their destination was a hillside at Champel, about a mile outside the city's walls.

In the midst of these fair-skinned Swiss, one man stood out, a prisoner. He was in his forties, dark, almost Moorish, dirty and weak, with a long unkempt beard and ragged clothing. A crowd of clergymen exhorting him to confess his sins surrounded him.

The prisoner's shabby appearance belied his status as one of Europe's leading physicians and preeminent thinkers. His crime was that of publishing a book that redefined Christianity in a more tolerant and inclusive way. Although his book contained, almost as an afterthought, a great scientific discovery—one which a century later would propel medicine into the modern age—on that October afternoon, no one in Geneva knew that, or cared. . . . On October 26, 1553, [he] was condemned to be led to Champel and burned there alive on the next day together with his books.

Torture and cruelty were no strangers to sixteenth-century justice. There was a strict hierarchy of punishment, from relatively painless to gruesomely agonizing, depending on the severity of the crime. Slanderers had their tongues cut out, thieves were impaled. The penalty for murder—beheading—was considered relatively charitable.

But of all the punishments, the very worst was to be burned alive, and so this horror was reserved for the most terrible crime there was—heresy. Heretics were especially loathed because they put not only their own souls in mortal jeopardy, but also those of otherwise innocent people infected by their teachings. . . . The whole point of burning at the stake was to subject the condemned heretic to prolonged, horrible, unendurable pain. This was the type of pain that awaited [him]—and he knew it.

When the prisoner was led to the hill at Champel, the stake and the pyre were made of fresh wood, green wood, newly cut branches with the leaves still attached. They sat him on a log and chained him to a post. His neck was bound with a thick rope. On his head they put a crown made of straw, doused in sulphur. Chained to his side was what was thought to be the last available copy of his dangerous book, the rest having all been zealously hunted down and destroyed. The ideas were to be burnt along with the man. There was no escape. The fire was lit. (Goldstone, Lawrence, and Goldstone, Nancy. Out of the Flames: The Remarkable Story of a Fearless Scholar, a Fatal Heresy, and One of the Rarest Books in the World. Broadway Books, 2002).

Here ends the reading.

The man who was burned at the stake in Geneva for the crime of heresy four hundred and fifty years ago was, of course, the Spaniard Michael Servetus. We honor him as one of our Unitarian martyrs and saints. Who was this man Servetus? What of his life and teachings are still today parts of our liberal religious heritage?

We know that Servetus was in many ways the quintessential Renaissance man. He was a brilliant thinker, who combined a passion for philosophy and theology with a passion for the emerging science of medicine. As a scientist and physician, Servetus is credited with the discovery of the function of the pulmonary system in the human body. As a theologian, he was a seminal Unitarian thinker and a Biblical scholar. The crime for which he was brutally executed was that of writing and publishing a book that challenged orthodox Christianity's understanding of the nature of Jesus.

But if Michael Servetus were to wander into one of our American Unitarian churches today, doubtless he would find us far more radical in our theology

than he ever was. We, on the other hand, would probably find Servetus rather quaint and old-fashioned. We might find his ideas about the nature of God and Jesus and about the importance of the Bible as the primary source of religious inspiration much too conservative to satisfy our present-day inclinations. For most of us, the theological issues for which he gave his life are moot. Not a single one of us today might be willing to undergo torture and death for the exact ideas that Servetus boldly proclaimed right up until the moment of his death.

But Servetus died not just for his theology. What he died for is an idea much larger than any doctrine. When we remember his life and death today, it is not because we are heirs to his theology, or that we all share his understanding of the Bible or of the nature of Jesus. We remember Michael Servetus today because we are the keepers of a much larger legacy.

Who was Servetus and what made him so dangerous that he had to be silenced? Born in Spain in 1511 to a wealthy family, Michael Servetus was given the benefit of an excellent education. He initially went to the university to pursue studies in both law and medicine. But it was his first exposure to the Bible that changed the course of his life and eventually sealed his fate. Raised in a devoutly Roman Catholic family, it was not until he went to university that Servetus, who read Greek, Hebrew and Latin, actually obtained a copy of the Bible. He read it carefully. Much to his surprise, he discovered that evidence to support the doctrine of the Trinity, the doctrine that proclaimed the divinity of Jesus as the second person of the Holy Trinity, was not to be found in the Christian Scriptures.

Why did this discovery come as such a surprise to Servetus? In the years just prior to Michael's birth, the Jews and Moors had been forced to leave Spain, convert to Christianity, or be put to the sword by the Spanish Inquisition. Thousands of Spain's oldest Jewish and Muslim families had had their lives threatened and their properties seized in the name of Christianity. Those Jews and Muslims who wished to avoid exile or death were forced to confess publicly, often at the point of a sword: "I believe in God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Ghost." Servetus, a sensitive and devout young man, was appalled that the doctrine of the Trinity—which had been used as the principal justification for the persecution of Jews and Moors-was not essential to Christian doctrine, at least according to the Bible.

Servetus became obsessed with writing about his conclusions and promoting a more tolerant, inclusive form of Christianity. Servetus thought that if the doctrine of the Trinity, the idea of God in three persons, was eliminated, Christians, Jews and Muslims could peacefully co-exist around this common understanding of the oneness of God. No one need be persecuted for his or her faith anymore simply because he or she could not affirm the divinity of Jesus or the notion of a three-in-one God. At age 20, Servetus published his first book, On the Errors of the Trinity. In spite of his youth, it was a scholarly and convincing work. Although theologians prior to this point in history had challenged the doctrine of the Trinity, Servetus' book found a wider audience because of the brand-new information technology of the day, the printing press. Before the invention of the printing press, you could silence a heresy simply by killing the heretic; but with the advent of the press, heretical ideas could travel everywhere, independent of their author. This development made liberal religious ideas much more dangerous.

Servetus personally sent copies of his book to the leaders of the Protestant Reformation, Martin Luther and John Calvin, with the hope that he might convince them to join with him in taking the Reformation to its logical conclusion, a fresh reformulation of church doctrine in light of Scripture. Luther and Calvin, however, wanted nothing to do with Servetus. Their initial quarrel with the Roman Catholic Church was not about the doctrines of the Christian faith, but about the absolute authority of Rome. For reasons that were as much political as theological, they feared what Servetus had dared put in writing. They worried that if the fledgling Protestant Reform movement veered too far from orthodox Christian doctrine, the Counter-Reformation of the Roman Catholic Church might engage in further violent suppressions of their movement. In order to survive, the Reformation needed a united political, as well as theological, front. There would be no schisms over doctrine that might serve to divide and weaken the new Protestant churches. Following the publication of his book, Servetus found himself simultaneously despised by the Reformation and hunted by the Inquisition.

Servetus had no choice but to leave Spain. He took a new identity and went into hiding in France. There, for 21 years, he was known and highly respected as Michel de Villeneuve, a brilliant doctor and scientist. During those years he put his mind to a scientific investigation of the human circulatory system. However, Servetus' real passion continued to be the reformation of the church. He published a second theological work, The Restoration of Christianity. Again his book captured the imaginations of isolated religious intellectuals living in Italy and Poland, but his new book only served to enrage both the leaders of the Catholic Inquisition and the Protestant Reformation. Soon after the publication of his second book, Dr. Michel de Villeneuve was exposed as that dangerous heretic, Michael Servetus. He was imprisoned by the French Inquisition, and would have been executed had he not escaped. Servetus found himself once more on the run, his life in danger from the Inquisition, and the leaders of the Protestant Reformation unwilling to offer him sanctuary.

When Servetus fled France he was on his way to seek asylum among a small community of liberal scholars in Northern Italy who were familiar with his work; but on the way to safety he stopped in Geneva, Switzerland, to seek an audience with John Calvin. Servetus was still convinced that if he could just meet with Calvin and demonstrate to him the Scriptural evidence, coupled with the rational arguments for doing away with the doctrine of the Trinity, Calvin would come to agree with him. At first Calvin indicated that he would be willing to see Servetus; but instead of receiving Servetus and listening to his arguments, Calvin had him arrested, thrown into jail, and eventually put on trial for the crime of heresy. In the courtroom, Servetus argued his own case well: his intellectual brilliance was unmistakable, and his arguments were convincing. Fearful that the Spaniard might attract followers, Calvin thought that the only way to stop the spread of this dangerous heresy was to destroy Servetus.

During the procession to Champel, where Servetus was to be burned along with his dangerous books, the people in the mob that surrounded him kept urging him, "Spare yourself, confess the Trinity, and live." But it is said that until the moment when the flames engulfed him, Servetus continued to cry out: "O, Jesus, Son of the Eternal God have pity on me!" Had he recanted and spoken the words, "O Jesus, Eternal Son of God," his life might have been spared. Even in order to save his own life Servetus would not utter what he did not believe to be true.

Unlike Luther and Calvin, Servetus did not leave behind a religious movement or churches that bear his name. He was a scholar, not a preacher. He is remembered today for his contribution to theology, as well as to science, only because other men risked their lives to preserve, print and distribute his books to an underground network of religious liberals.

We remember Michael Servetus on this day, the same day celebrated by Protestant movements as Reformation Sunday. We do not do so because we still affirm the specific beliefs for which Servetus was willing to die. What we affirm and celebrate today, however, is perhaps the most cherished principle of liberal religion: that principle known as freedom of conscience.

Freedom of conscience is often mistakenly taken to mean that we Unitarians are without theology, or that we are free to believe anything we might want to believe. Or that here in this church, individual beliefs simply don't matter. Nothing could be further from the truth. By freedom of conscience we mean not just that we each have the right to freedom of belief within our churches, but that we each have the duty, the moral obligation, to continue to seek out answers, to keep growing in our faith, to question the received wisdom, and to cherish our doubts. We do not believe in the truth of something simply because we might want to believe it, but only because we must believe it—because we have tested it, tried it, and proven it to our own satisfaction, not once, but time and time again. To say that for us, as a community of faith, belief is unimportant is to miss the fact that we regard beliefs as much too important to trust to anyone or anything other than the integrity of our own conscience. For us, faith is the faithful pursuit of knowledge and understanding, always with the trust that the truth will set us free.

Today no Unitarian body, no minister, no denominational official has the right to speak on behalf of another Unitarian in matters of conscience. No one here has the right to coerce your belief or to threaten your right to act in accordance with the dictates of your mind and heart. We gather as a community of faithfulness, united not by a common creed or by a set of beliefs, but by a common covenant, a set of promises we make to each other, promises rooted in a tolerance based on mutual respect, honor and humility. We know too well that the heretics of one generation are, more often than not, the heroes of the next.

As a people of faith, we are not threatened by our differences or by new ideas. For us revelation is not sealed or complete. New light is still waiting to break forth. New insights, new knowledge, whether they be in the field of religion, science or the social sciences will eventually displace even today's best wisdom. Authentic faith is never threatened by new information. We remain open to new ideas regardless of their source. That was true 450 years ago and it is true today. We honor those who were willing to make the ultimate sacrifice for our freedom to put all ideas to the test. We say, "Let the Reformation continue."

I conclude with the words of Lawrence and Nancy Goldstone: "Michael Servetus was one of those great, overlooked figures. With kinder turns of fate, he might well have changed the course of history in not one but two fields—first, by ushering in a simpler, purer and more generous Christianity and, second, by prompting a more curious and effective medical science. Instead, Michael Servetus was hunted down and burned at the stake." (Goldstone, Out of the Flames, 2002).

Servetus' execution marked a turning point in the quest for freedom of expression. Thousands had been executed for heresy before him and others would be executed after him. But the extraordinary nature of both Servetus the man, and Servetus the representative of honest and passionate dissent, rippled though Europe in ways that his enemies had never foreseen.

Servetus' detractors, and indeed, some of his supporters, have denounced him as an extremist—obsessed, inflexible, and blind to the forces around him. Yet it was these very qualities that compelled his refusal to compromise his beliefs even unto death. And it was that refusal, in turn, that drove his enemies to drop their masks of righteousness and exert the full force of repression to silence him. And so the trial of Michael Servetus stands with other, similar events, like the Dreyfus case and the Scopes trial, as a testament to the courage of conscience. These cases became starting points at which other champions of justice and fairness could draw a line to say, "This is wrong." Amen.