A BURNING ISSUE OF BELIEF BOOKS
By John Carey.
1,258 words
9 February 2003
The Sunday Times
English
(c) 2003 Times Newspapers Ltd Not Available for Re-dissemination.
OUT OF THE FLAMES: The Story of One of the Rarest Books in
the World and How it Changed the Course of History. By Lawrence
and Nancy Goldstone. Century £12.99 pp358
Not many people have heard of Michael Servetus. But if the
Christian church had had its way, nobody would have heard
of him at all. When he was burned at the stake for heresy
in 1553, a copy of his treatise, provocatively titled The
Restitution of Christianity, was chained to his body to burn
with him, and the authorities hunted down and destroyed every
other printed copy they could find.
Servetus's sin was not believing in the holy trinity. For
God to consist of three persons seemed to him irrational and
mystifying. He pointed out, correctly, that there was no mention
of the trinity in the Bible. The doctrine, he insisted, was
a blatant fabrication, imposed on the church by the Council
of Nicea in AD325. "The kingdom of heaven knows none
of this nonsense."
Born in northern Spain, which had a higher proportion of Jews
and Muslims than most of Europe, Servetus was probably alerted
to the oddity of the three-in one God by contact with these
great monotheistic faiths. By the time he was 13 he had mastered
Hebrew, as well as French, Latin and Greek, and he added Arabic
so that he could read the Koran. Consorting with Jews and
"infidel Turks" was charged against him at his trial.
But these are only clues. Little is known about his life,
and what is known does not fit easily together. It is hard
to make him seem rational and progressive. He was a vehement
advocate of astrology, believed in the imminence of the apocalypse
and recorded his one great scientific discovery - the pulmonary
circulation of the blood - only in passing, to illustrate
a theological point in the text of the Restitution.
It seems clear that, like other pious Christians of his day,
he thought the nature of God enormously more important than
human anatomy.
It was, for all that, an astonishing breakthrough. How blood
passed from one ventricle of the heart to the other had baffled
all previous researchers, including Vesalius, the founder
of modern anatomy, who thought that the central division of
the heart must have invisible holes in it for the blood to
flow through. Servetus, as a medical student in Paris, seems
to have attended only two or three anatomies, but he saw what
everyone else had missed. With the destruction of his treatise
the secret was lost again, however, and 75 years later the
Englishman William Harvey, who knew nothing of Servetus, got
the credit for discovering it.
While still an adolescent Servetus felt himself divinely called
to put Christians right about their God's true numerical status,
and his first book on the subject came out when he was just
20. It caused such outrage that he published a more conciliatory
version the following year, for which he was sentenced to
death in absentia by the Spanish Inquisition. Sensing that
further doctrinal instruction might prove fatal, he changed
his name and went underground. It was in this period that
he studied medicine in Paris, and also lectured on geography
and mathematics.
Then he worked, still incognito, as a country doctor, gaining
a reputation for selflessness. When the plague struck Lyon,
it was said he did not flee but stayed to tend the sick.
What lured him back to religious controversy was, it seems,
his hatred of Calvin, a sentiment that Calvin heartily reciprocated.
Calvin's belief that God predestined some souls to salvation
and others to damnation struck Servetus as monstrous, and
Calvin's denial of free will, Servetus argued, "turns
us into logs and stones". He sent a copy of Calvin's
Institutes back to its author with insulting notes plastered
all over its margins. It was, shrilled Calvin, "befouled
with vomit". In revenge, the great Genevan reformer procured
a copy of Servetus's Restitution, secretly published in 1553,
tore out the first 16 pages and sent them, as damning evidence,
to the officers of the Inquisition. Servetus was arrested
and questioned, but managed to escape. Then - the last perplexing
act of his perplexing life - instead of heading for Venice
or some other Italian city where he might have been safe,
he went to Geneva, where Calvin had him arrested, tried and
burned.
Lawrence and Nancy Goldstone are not historians but bibliophiles.
They met, according to the blurb, while working on Wall Street,
and their interest in rare books began when Nancy "went
in search of a hardback edition of War and Peace for Lawrence's
birthday" - not, you would think, a Herculean bibliophilic
quest.
Their interest in Servetus arose from the fact that three
copies of his Restitution somehow escaped the zeal of the
book burners, and the second half of Out of the Flames logs
the transit of these rare volumes through various libraries
and auction rooms to their present locations in Paris, Vienna
and Edinburgh. There are occasional glimmers of interest.
The Edinburgh copy, for example, turns out to be Calvin's
own, with its first 16 pages missing. But for the most part
this section is a maze of tedium. Who can want to know that
a descendant of the Hungarian Count Teleki, who presented
Joseph II of Austria with his copy of the Restitution, became
a senior official in the International Boy Scouts?
The first half, which tells Servetus's story, is altogether
more gripping, though here, too, the Goldstones hit snags.
They seem to assume that they are writing for readers completely
ignorant of history, who will be bored unless it is presented
as a series of sensational events, with local colour splashed
around like ketchup at a barbecue. On ideas, they are either
silent or shaky. Their explanations of scholasticism and humanism
would shame a first-year undergraduate, and their account
of how anti-trinitarian thought developed into Unitarianism
misses vital tie-ups. They mention the establishment of a
Unitarian college at Racow in Poland, but fail to notice that
the English edition of the Racovian catechism was licensed
for the press by none other than John Milton, who rivals Isaac
Newton as the greatest English anti-trinitarian.
What stays with you is their account of the barbarities undertaken
in the name of God in the century after Servetus's death.
The scale varied from individual devilry (a special machine
for raising and lowering heretics in and out of the flames
to prolong their agony) to the butchering of whole towns.
During the Thirty Years war the population of Germany was
reduced from 21m to 13m, and that was without weapons of mass
destruction. The lesson of history is that ruthlessness is
next to godliness, and it is one worth relearning, on the
brink of a war that at least one side regards as holy. For
that matter, the present crisis brings the trinity back into
the political limelight. Islamic extremists reportedly regard
the doctrine as an insult to the oneness of Allah, for which
Christians must be slain. Unfortunately, Servetus's fate shows
that Christians thought it worth killing for, too.
Available at the Books Direct price of £10.39 plus £1.95
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Read on...
websites:
www.uua.org/uuhs/duub/ articles/michaelservetus.html
Biography of Servetus from a Unitarian collection
(c) Times Newspapers Ltd, 2003.
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