Out of the Flames

Please give my Amazon review a helpful vote - https://www.amazon.com/review/R17Y500XO012PU/ref=cm_cr_rdp_perm


Michael Servetus was a 16th century polymath. He was born in Spain in 1511, demonstrated a gift for learning in his childhood, given a first-rate education, and was part of the entourage at Charles V's coronation in 1530. At 20, Servetus went AWOl from the court of Charles V and professed Protestantism. Servetus's Protestantism was a Protestantism with a difference in that he was - or may have - been influenced by the vestigial Jewish and Muslim influences of his native lands - certainly, he had read both the Old Testament and the Koran in their original languages - which inspired him to advocate an anti-trinitarian theology.

He was in short a Unitarian, albeit he was referred to, on occasions, as an “Arian.”

The authors explain the position expressed by the twenty-year-old Servetus in his first work, The Error of the Trinity, as follows:

“About viewing the Holy Spirit as “a separate being,” Servetus wrote that it was “practical tritheism, no better than atheism.” He added that the doctrine of the Trinity itself was “inconceivable, worst of all [it] incurs the ridicule of the Mohammedans and the Jews.” Finally, he observed, “I know not what madness it is in men that does not see that in the Scriptures every sort of unity of God is always referred to as the Father.”

We are told by the authors that Servetus could find nothing in the Bible that supported a Trinitarian position, and that Servetus joined a long line of Reformers who pinned the original sin of Christianity on the Council of Nicea.

The authors speculate that Servetus forced the hands of the Reformers by making the Trinity a controversy over a doctrine that they might otherwise have abandoned if allowed to develop over time:

“In fact, the Trinity had already been causing problems for the reformers, independent of anything Servetus had written. Luther left it out of his catechisms, and others had tried to avoid the subject entirely. Nonetheless, they were hesitant about eliminating the Trinitarian doctrine entirely and casting such an obvious insult at the Catholic Church. Servetus, it has been argued, by the directness of his attack, brought the issue prematurely into the open and forced the reform movement to decide whether it would support the Trinity or not. Without Servetus's book, the Protestant churches might well have later rejected the Nicene Creed and adopted Servetus's view of the Trinity as three dispositions of God.”

Perhaps, although it seems unlikely.

With the publication of his book, Servetus wore out his welcome in Basil and left for Paris under the assumed name of Michael Villeneuve. He crossed paths with another headstrong Reformer in Paris, namely, John Calvin. Servetus had a career as an editor, as part of which he edited an new edition of Ptolemy's Geography. Servetus went back to school to study medicine and spent a couple of decades practicing medicine, antagonizing John Calvin, in Geneva, and writing and publishing a new book of Unitarian theology. With the publication of his new book, Christianismi Restitutio (The Restoration of Christianity), the jig was up and the full force of French orthodoxy descended upon Servetus, instigated, according to the authors, by John Calvin, who dreamed of nothing more special than seeing Servetus executed.

Calvin got his chance when, for reasons mysterious, Servetus fled his hometown of Lyon for Italy by heading the opposite direction, traveling to Geneva, and popping into the church where Calvin was preaching. Servetus was spotted, identified, arrested, tried, and finally burned at the stake with his book.

For the authors, Calvin is the villain of this book. If the reader has any doubt, consider the author's description of Calvin:

“He came in, this mere twig of a man, thin, bent over, almost cadaverous, with the long Frankish nose, the wisp of a beard, and the smoldering stare that itself was enough to break most men. He walked slowly to a place at the front of the room, trailed by his ministers.”

Servetus, of course, is a prince of a man and beloved by all for his warmth, humanity and generosity.

With that, I have to say that I am in a quandary about how I should rate this book. It has some virtues and some vices.

My biggest problem is the lack of footnotes. There is a bibliography at the end, but there is no way to connect any particular claim with any particular source. This frustrates fact-checking or further research.

This flaw is compounded by other problems. One problem is the obvious hagiography and bias of the authors. The authors are telling Servetus' story in the mold of Arthur Dickson White's “Warfare Thesis” with religion being constantly depicted as superstitious and regressive and always aiming at suppressing science lest religion loses its control over the minds of the population. Thus, we get silly statements like:

“He even altered the mode of papal dress by wearing long hunting boots, making it a good deal more difficult for the devout to kiss his toe.”

Seriously? I am dying to see the source of that claim.

This one is simply wrong:

“Despite the council's edict, designated as the Nicene Creed, it remained difficult for the Church, even on pain of heresy, to convince the faithful to embrace the new doctrine, which many found incomprehensible.”

In fact, it was generally the Eastern theologians who went along with Arianism, but it was the laity whose worship presupposed that Jesus was God who refused to accept Arianism and could not comprehend how Arianism. (An excellent source on this is [[ASIN:B003UV8ZZ8 When Jesus Became God: The Epic Fight over Christ's Divinity in the Last Days of Rome]].)

This one misconstrues the sociology of the Middle Ages:

“Prohibiting access to the Bible had for more than a thousand years been the primary instrument of Church control. Only a select few were allowed to read the Scriptures and determine their meaning.”

By “select few,” the authors presumably mean “everyone who could read.” After all, the church set up schools to teach literacy, only a “select few” could attend, and those “select few” became the clergy.

The world before printing and the wealth that we take for granted was not our world.

In other words, this book is filled with tendentious misrepresentations, exaggerations and half-truths, which is hardly surprising inasmuch as one of the books identified in the bibliography actually is Andrew Dickson White's tendentious, anti-clerical work, written in 1905, Dickson, A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom. It is really surprising to see that book cited as serious support for a supposed work of scholarship. It is like looking in the footnotes and finding a citation to a Jack Chick tract.

On which point, another source for the authors was “De Rosa, Peter, Vicars of Christ: The Dark Side of the Papacy (New York, 1988; Crown).” This text is less a work of scholarship than it is a polemical piece written by a putative Catholic who opposes the Church's position on abortion. Certainly, there are more objective and more recent texts than this one, which has a title that speaks to its appeal to a nasty kind of anti-Catholicism.

Another strange thing was the age of the sources. There may have been sources more recent than the mid-90s, but I noticed that the only history of the papacy - other than scandal-mongering De Rosa book - was written in the 1950s.

So, caveat emptor. There is a lot here to be suspicious of.

Another thing that was weird is the way that the authors managed to fit the biography of a theologian into the “War on Science” theme. They do this by noting that in an offhand passage of Christianismi Restitutio, Servetus speculated that blood was exchanged through the ventricles, thereby anticipating William Harvey by 75 years. On this basis, the authors pronounce Servetus as a man of science who would have revolutionized science but for evil religion hunting him down.

Of course, religion didn't hunt him down; he went in the direction of religion after tweaking religion's nose for decades. Also, although it is fascinating to see another instance of the strange dynamic of scientific anticipation, whereby discoveries are made independently at almost the same time, we have no basis for knowing how Servetus knew this. Was he prepared to do the hard work of demonstrating his theory, as Harvey did? Was it a lucky guess? What was the context of this observation? We have no idea, as neat and as fascinating as the author's claims are. Moreover, this discovery had absolutely nothing to do with Servetus' fate. So this is a slender reed on which to base a “Warfare on Science” thesis.

On the other hand, when the authors moved away from their hobbyhorse of bashing religion tout court, I got the feeling that they were more trustworthy. I liked their description of the dynamics of publishing, the history of Unitarianism, and the career of Erasmus. I particularly liked the last part of the text which involves the incredible story of the survival of the last three copies of the Christianismi Restitutio, including Calvin's copy.

So, it is mixed bag. Read it and enjoy it, but don't buy into the slant and spin.