Michael Servetus, the unique heretic persecuted by the Spanish and French Catholic Inquisition, as well as by the Protestant courts, was a victim of the intolerance of the two Christian Churches. Champion of freedom of conscience, he dared to question the thorny doctrine of the Holy Trinity and the baptism of children before the use of reason, an indomitable attitude that cost him his life one cold noon on October 27, 1553, when he was burned alive over low heat with green wood in Geneva at the behest of Calvin.
A native of Villanueva de Sijena (Huesca), our greatest heretic lived forty-two years. Half of his brief life was spent in harsh exiles, forced to disguise his true personality and being persecuted to the death.
Born in 1511, Servetus entered the service as page and secretary, in 1525, of Juan de Quintana, an eminent Franciscan with an Erasmian spirit, who sent him to the University of Toulouse. There he studied in depth the Complutense Polyglot Bible and some books of Lutheran doctrine, but his stay ended abruptly when he was declared the leader of a group of heterodox people.
Returning to Spain in 1529, he joined the emperor's entourage along with his mentor Quintana, then confessor of Charles V. From Barcelona he left for Bologna to attend the coronation of Charles V as emperor by Pope Clement VII in February 1530. During the ceremony, the luxury of the pontiff – sitting on a gold chair under a gold canopy – provoked the indignation of Servetus, already captivated by evangelical simplicity and intimate Christian worship.
Twenty years later, in his Restitution of Christianity, he would write: “With my own eyes I have seen how the princes carried him [the pope] with pomp on their shoulders, how all the people adored him on their knees…, who could kiss his feet.” or the sandals considered themselves luckier than the others and proclaimed that they had obtained numerous indulgences, thanks to which long years of infernal suffering would be reduced. Oh, Beast, the vilest of Beasts, the most shameless of harlots.”
These high-calibre insults against the temporal power of the Church of Rome were common in Protestant circles – the pope as antichrist, the apocalyptic beast – and were captured in widely distributed pamphlets, illustrated by Cranach or Holbein, which represented Christ. barefoot and the pope under a canopy raking the indulgence money, Christ ascending to heaven and the pope descending to hell.
Luther described the Pope as “a red prostitute, with whom the kings and princes of the earth have fornicated and continue to fornicate,” and insisted that they had to continue attacking her “until at last she is trampled as unclean and there is nothing so abject on earth.” like that bloodthirsty Jezebel.”
With this way of thinking, Michael Servetus could not continue at the imperial court. In July 1530 we find him in Basel, where he had gone to meet Erasmus of Rotterdam, the already declining idol of the moderate reform of the Church. But Miguel was unaware that the prince of the humanists had left more than a year earlier, due to the tumults and destruction of churches derived from the violent imposition of Lutheranism.
The leader of the Protestants in Basel was John Oecolampadius, who, impressed by Servetus's biblical knowledge, invited him to be his guest and disciple. Theological discussions between the two soon soured. After ordering him to correct his errors, Ecolampadio threatened Miguel with denouncing him to the authorities as a heretic, and the daring Spanish boy had to put his foot down.
In 1531 he appeared in Strasbourg, a city with a reputation for liberalism. The prominent Protestant leaders Martin Bucer and Wolfgang Capito resided there, whose anti-Trinitarian tendencies were known to Servetus. Strasbourg then had a large Anabaptist community that denied baptism to children and demanded that adults be rebaptized (in Greek, anna means “again”), a doctrine assimilated by Servetus and presented with more solid arguments than anyone else.
As the most radical wing of Anabaptism also demanded an egalitarian social revolution and comprehensive pacifism, decrees multiplied prohibiting it as heretical under penalty of death.
The religious effervescence and the contact with notable Hebraists and Hellenists would be the breeding ground from which the Seven Books on the Errors about the Trinity (1531) and the Two Books of Dialogues on the Trinity (1532) would emerge, in which Servetus discussed the dogma of the Holy Trinity established at the Council of Nicaea (IV century).
The scandal of denying a doctrine as basic as that of the Trinity aroused furious comments. From the “pestilentemente” (superlative smell of heresy) with which his former mentor Quintana described him to the severe threat of Martin Bucer, who said that Servetus “deserved death and being dismembered.”
It was Jerónimo Aleandro, nuncio to Germany, former Erasmian and now shrewd persecutor of heretics, who instigated the Spanish Inquisition in May 1532 to search all the bookstores in Zaragoza to see if they had any of Servetus' books.
The Zaragoza inquisitorial court resorted to fraud to arrest him, and even forced his younger brother, Juan, to go look for him in Germany to bring him with some decoy to Spain. Miguel was not fooled, and, knowing he was being persecuted by Protestants and Catholics, he wrote: “Terrified and having gone into exile, I hid for years among foreigners in sorrowful sadness of spirit.”
A fugitive from Spanish and French justice, Miguel Servet then changed his identity and camouflaged himself under the name Miguel de Villanueva, while continuing his studies at the University of Paris. There began the fateful fascination, a mixture of attraction and rejection, that Calvino felt for Miguel.
Although he had had to flee France, Calvin risked his life to return to Paris and have a theological discussion with the Spaniard, which ultimately failed to materialize. Servetus then took refuge in Lyon with his printer friends and published a new, improved edition of Ptolemy's famous Geography in 1535. Two years later, he returned to Paris to study medicine, where he stood out for his skill as a dissector, coinciding with Vesalius.
From his anatomical training derives the inclusion in Restitution of Christianity (1553) of the famous passage where he describes, for the first time in the West, the circulation of blood in the lungs, a discovery that has given him universal fame. However, this physiological fact was already known by the Arab Ibn Al Nafis – whose Commentaries on the Canon of Avicenna (1245) circulated manuscripts in Venice since 1521 – and would later also be described by the anatomy manuals of Valverde de Amusco (1556). and Realdo Colombo (1559).
As is known, the most scientific analysis of the mechanism of blood circulation would be the work of William Harvey in 1628. At the base of Servetus' original and widespread contribution to pulmonary physiology was an interest with religious roots. He assumed that the soul – described as a spark of the Holy Spirit – would penetrate the man with his first breath, incorporating itself into the blood, which would lead him to transfer his medical knowledge to theology.
According to Ángel Alcalá, to whom we owe the bilingual edition of the complete works of Servetus, Restitution of Christianity “is an ocean of suggestions.” A systematic criticism of the corruption of official Christianity and a proposal for radical reform similar to that of the Anabaptists, but immensely superior due to its theological density.
Once all hierarchical structure of the Church was suppressed, the Christian community that Michael Servetus dreamed of would be based on the purity of faith, freedom and tolerance, without persecution of dissidents, nor rites or ceremonies. Catholics and Protestants found very serious heresies in Restitution of Christianity, and Servetus was arrested in Vienne by the French Inquisition with the materials provided, directly or indirectly, by Calvin.
He managed to escape, so he was sentenced to death in absentia on June 17, 1553 and burned in effigy. Four months later, denounced by Calvin – who condemned heretics and blasphemers just like Catholics – he would be captured in Geneva and punished by being burned alive over a slow fire.
In response to Calvin's book in which he attempted to justify the death of Servetus, the Italian humanist Sebastiano Casteglione stated: “I do not defend the doctrine of Servetus; What I attack is the bad doctrine of Calvin. After having him burned alive, he now attacks him, already dead. Killing a man for his ideas is not defending a doctrine; "It's killing a man."
The death of Servetus, subjected to the horrible torment of the flames - since even the beheading that he cried crying was denied -, like that of Savonarola or Giordano Bruno, accuses his accusers and constitutes one of the greatest historical scourges of religious fanaticism.
Heterodox par excellence, the wise Spanish man, supreme doctor, scientist and theologian, was always a fervent believer. A martyr for his radical Christianity, more Christian, although less orthodox, than the doctrinaireism imposed by the Roman and Lutheran Churches. His main legacy, the right to freedom of conscience and expression in a time when one could not proclaim one's beliefs except at the risk of one's life, continues in force.
As Roland H. Bainton pointed out in his splendid biography of Servetus, today we are horrified that that great man was turned into ashes for his ideas, “but we do not hesitate to reduce entire cities to dust under the pretext of defending our culture.”
