The Servet affair: Castellion's unheard voice
Before coming to Castellion, we must pause here at the ‘Servet affair'. On 27 October 1553, Michel Servet[1] was burned at the stake in Champel, next to the walls of Geneva. The principal crime of which he was accused was having had published books considered blasphemous against the Trinity[2] , which he called “a devil and monster with three heads”.
Michel Servet was a contemporary of Calvin. Originally from Spain, he was a scholar and a humanist as well as a doctor. His previous greatest commercial success had been a book on the virtues of therapeutic cordials! Servet, who rejected the Church of Rome, was drawn to Reform. He was a supporter of the Protestant reformers' search for the true faith in Scripture alone (sola Scriptura) and not based on ecclesiastical tradition. But he felt that Protestant reformists had not gone far enough in the application of this principle in that they accepted baptism of new-born infants[3] (not mentioned in the New Testament), and that they defended the Trinity (against the reading of certain texts in the New Testament). In 1531, Servet published a tract, his De Trinitatis erroribus (the errors of the Trinity). He picked a fight with Calvin in the form of a sometimes violently worded exchange of correspondence. For example, when Calvin sent him his Institution de la religion chrétienne, Servet returned it to him with annotations which were in some cases insulting. Having a thin skin was not the least of Calvin's faults; he came to consider Servet not only as a heretic but as a personal enemy.
Servet was arrested in Vienne (in Dauphiné) by the Inquisition[4] , but he managed to escape and turned up in Geneva in 1553. He was spotted and immediately arrested. It was in prison, where he suffered poor treatment, that he first came into contact with Calvin, who made clear to the Council[5] the gravity of the accusations against Servet. He also sought the advice of sister churches in Zurich and Basel, which confirmed the seriousness of Servet's errors. Convinced by this that they were dealing with a dangerous heretic, the Council condemned Servet and had him executed immediately. This was a minor episode in Calvin's life, but it quickly took on a critical significance in the history of toleration.
Every society sets limits on what is tolerated and what is not. It is a dangerous exercise, above all because, as all students of history well know, it can never be definitive. In the history of toleration in Europe, these limits changed a great deal between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. Most of our contemporaries would have trouble seeing Servet as a dangerous man who must be eliminated. But in the sixteenth century, in Geneva as elsewhere in Europe, he was seen as just as harmful as a terrorist or paedophile would be seen today. To say his execution was a crime, therefore, would be to apply to the sixteenth century the criteria of the Universal Declaration of Rights of 1948; the language and implications would be unhistorical.
Calvin, in advising on the trial, hoped to settle the Servet affair. Historians have viewed this in hindsight as a grave tactical error. If Servet had simply been drummed out of Geneva or given a whipping, which would amount to the same thing, either he would have continued to give his views with no one to hear them, or – and this second option seems more probable – he would have been arrested again by the Inquisition and put to death in France, Spain or Italy. In either case, the name of Servet would hardly be known in Geneva today. The day when Calvin thought he had settled the Servet affair, in reality he had begun it.
In fact, the criticism of Calvin began as soon as the ashes of the pyre had cooled. The most vehement of these was unquestionably that of Castellion, who protested against the condemnation of a heretic. He wrote his text “Contre un libelle de Calvin” (in which the latter tries to justify his severity). It is important to note that the text was written during the course of 1554, but it wasn't published until 1612, in Holland. The document under discussion could not therefore have had any impact on the evolution of opinion in the sixteenth century.
Castellion did not comment on Servet's theology (which he seems not especially to have appreciated), but he denounced Calvin. In having Servet killed, the Genevan reformist brought the martyr to the attention of the world at large; his books were almost unknown, but “now you have burned them, everyone is burning to read them”. Castellion had especially harsh things to say about those who condemned Servet: “Killing a man is not defending a doctrine, it is killing a man.”
In other words, Castellion declined to take the fight to the field of doctrine; it scarcely mattered, in truth, whether Servet was right or wrong. But if he was wrong, he must be fought with argument, not with physical force. If a wrongdoer endangers public order by stealing or murdering, it is the duty of the state to deal with him and put him to death. But if all a heretic does is publish texts, only the publication of other texts to refute him will silence him.
