OUT OF THE FLAMES:The Remarkable Story of a Fearless Scholar,
a Fatal Heresy, and One of the Rarest Books in the World
By William C Placher, 25th January 2003, The Christian Century,
Volume 120, Issue 2
MICHAEL SERVETUS'S Restitutio Christianismi is quite a book.
One of the first attacks on the doctrine of the Trinity, it
also described for the first time the circulation of the blood-and
led to Servetus's being burned to death in Calvin's Geneva.
Only three copies of the original edition survive. The Goldstones,
authors of popular works on book collecting, tell the story
of Servetus and of his book.
Servetus was a Spanish physician, scientist, theologian and
any number of other things. Already a published author at
19, he impressed and annoyed nearly everyone he met. Early
in life he concluded that the doctrine of the Trinity is contrary
to scripture, and, once he published his views, had to live
in hiding or on the run. Passing through Geneva, he was caught,
imprisoned and then burned (Calvin favored execution but opposed
burning). Servetus's ideas parallel (and may have influenced)
Unitarianism, whose later history the Goldstones trace. His
book's casual mention that the blood circulates through the
body anticipated William Harvey's "discovery" of
that principle by 75 years. Calvin and others sought to destroy
all the copies of Servetus's heretical volume. That only three
survive, each with its own interesting history, makes it one
of the world's rarest printed books.
The Goldstones know how to tell a good story, though they
sometimes slow the narrative down by including the life history
of nearly everyone who ever owned a copy of the Restitutio
or had anything to do with Unitarianism. Some of their historical
conclusions miss the mark, and their bibliography shows a
puzzling preference for 19th-century works. Why would one
draw on the 1914 edition of the Catholic Encyclopedia's article
on Calvin and ignore everything written about Calvin during
the past 25 years? William Bouwsma's Calvin (portrayed in
his 1989 biography), a tortured soul, would have made a more
interesting (and more accurate) opponent for Servetus than
the cardboard tyrant here described.
This year will mark the 50th anniversary of the publication
of Roland Bainton's Hunted Heretic: The Life and Death of
Michael Servetus, still a model of how to combine solid scholarship
and vivid prose and still in print, at less than half the
price of Out of the Flames.
Reviewed by William C. Placher, professor of theology at
Wabash College in Crawfordsville, Indiana.
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