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Michael Servetus
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Michael Servetus (also Miguel Servet or Miguel Serveto; 29 September, 1511 – 27 October, 1553) was a Spanish theologian, physician, and humanist and the first European to describe the function of pulmonary circulation.
His interests included many sciences: astronomy and meteorology; geography, jurisprudence, study of the Bible, mathematics, anatomy, and medicine. He is renowned in the history of several of these fields, particularly medicine and theology.
He participated in the Protestant Reformation, and later developed a nontrinitarian Christology. Condemned by Catholics and Protestants alike, he was burnt at the stake by order of the Protestant Geneva governing council as a heretic.
Early life and educationServetus was born as Miquel Serveto Conesa alias Revés at Villanueva de Sijena, Huesca, Aragon, Spain, in 1511, probably on September 29, the feast day of Saint Michael, although no specific record exists.
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Michael Servetus (also Miguel Servet or Miguel Serveto; 29 September, 1511 – 27 October, 1553) was a Spanish theologian, physician, and humanist and the first European to describe the function of pulmonary circulation.
His interests included many sciences: astronomy and meteorology; geography, jurisprudence, study of the Bible, mathematics, anatomy, and medicine. He is renowned in the history of several of these fields, particularly medicine and theology.
He participated in the Protestant Reformation, and later developed a nontrinitarian Christology. Condemned by Catholics and Protestants alike, he was burnt at the stake by order of the Protestant Geneva governing council as a heretic.
Early life and educationServetus was born as Miquel Serveto Conesa alias Revés at Villanueva de Sijena, Huesca, Aragon, Spain, in 1511, probably on September 29, the feast day of Saint Michael, although no specific record exists. Some sources give an earlier date based on Servetus' own occasional claim of being born in 1509. His paternal ancestors came from the hamlet of Serveto, in the Aragonese Pyrenees, which gave the family their surname. The maternal line descended from Jewish conversos of the Monzón area. His father Antonio Serveto (alias Revés, i.e. "Reverse") was a notary. Servetus had two brothers: one who later became a notary like their father, and another who was a Catholic priest. Servetus was very gifted in languages and studied Latin, Greek and Hebrew under the instruction of Dominican friars. At the age of fifteen, Servetus entered the service of a Franciscan friar by the name of Juan de Quintana, an Erasmian, and read the entire Bible in its original languages from the manuscripts that were available at that time. He later attended the University of Toulouse in 1526 where he studied law. There he became suspect of participating in secret meetings and activities of Protestant students.
In 1528, Servetus traveled through Germany and Italy with Quintana, who was then Charles V's confessor in the imperial retinue. In October 1530 he visited Johannes Oecolampadius in Basel, staying there for about ten months, and probably supporting himself as a proofreader for a local printer. By this time, he was already spreading his beliefs. In May 1531 he met Martin Bucer and Fabricius Capito in Strasbourg. Then two months later, in July, he published De trinitatis erroribus ("On the Errors of the Trinity"). The next year he published Dialogorum de Trinitate ("Dialogues on the Trinity") and De Iustitia Regni Christi ("On the Justice of Christ's Reign").
He took on the pseudonym Michel de Villeneuve (i.e., "Michael from Villanueva"), in order to avoid persecution by the Church because of these religious works. He studied at the College Calvi in Paris in 1533. After an interval, he returned to Paris to study medicine in 1536. In Paris, his teachers included Sylvius, Fernel, and Guinter, who hailed him with Vesalius as his most able assistant in dissections.
TheologyIn these books, Servetus rejected the belief of the Trinity as not based on the Bible but on the teachings of (Greek) philosophers and advocated a return to a supposed simplicity of the Gospels and the early Church Fathers. In part he hoped that the dismissal of the Trinitarian dogma would also make Christianity more appealing to Judaism and Islam, which had preserved the unity of God in their teachings, whereas trinitarians, according to Servetus, had turned Christianity into a form of "tritheism", or belief in three gods.
Servetus affirmed that the divine Logos, which was the manifestation of God and not a separate divine Person, was incarnated in a human being, Jesus, when God's spirit came into the womb of the Virgin Mary. Only from the moment of conception, the Son was actually generated. Therefore the Son was not eternal, but only the Logos from which He was formed. For this reason, Servetus always rejected calling Christ the "eternal Son of God" but rather called him "the Son of the eternal God" .
In describing Servetus' view of the Logos, Andrew Dibb explained: In Genesis God reveals himself as the creator. In John he reveals that he created by means of the Word, or Logos, Finally, also in John, he shows that this Logos became flesh and 'dwelt among us'. Creation took place by the spoken word, for God said "Let there be …" The spoken word of Genesis, the Logos of John, and the Christ, are all one and the same.
Servetus states his view clearly in the preamble to Restoration of Christianity (1553): "There is nothing greater, reader, than to recognize that God has been manifested as substance, and that His divine nature has been truly communicated. We shall clearly apprehend the manifestation of God through the Word and his communication through the Spirit, both of them substantially in Christ alone."
This theology, though original in some respects, has often been compared to Adoptionism, Arianism, and Sabellianism, which were condemned as old Christian heresies by Trinitarian scholars. Nevertheless, Servetus rejected these theologies in his books: Adoptionism, because it denied Jesus's divinity; Arianism, because it multiplied the hypostases and established a rank; and Sabellianism, because it confused the Father with the Son.
Under severe pressure from Catholics and Protestants alike, Servetus clarified this explanation in his second book, Dialogues (1532), to show the Logos coterminous with Christ. He was nevertheless accused of heresy because of his insistence on denying the dogma of the Trinity and the individuality of three divine Persons in one God.
CareerAfter his studies in medicine he started a medical practice. He became personal physician to Pierre Palmier Archbishop of Vienne, and was also physician to Guy de Maugiron, the lieutenant governor of Dauphiné. While he practiced medicine near Lyon for about fifteen years, he also published two other works dealing with Ptolemy's Geography. Servetus dedicated his first edition of Ptolemy and his edition of the Bible to his patron Hugues de la Porte, and dedicated his second edition of Ptolemy's Geography to his other patron, Archbishop Palmier. While in Lyon, Symphorien Champier, a medical humanist, had been Servetus' patron, and the pharmacological tracts which Servetus wrote there were written in defense of Champier against Leonhart Fuchs.
While also working as a proof reader, he published several more books which dealt with medicine and pharmacology. Years earlier he had sent a copy to John Calvin, initiating a correspondence between the two. Initially in the correspondence Servetus used the pseudonym "Michel de Villeneuve".
In 1553 Servetus published yet another religious work with further Antitrinitarian views. It was entitled Christianismi Restitutio, a work that sharply rejected the idea of predestination and the idea that God had condemned souls to Hell regardless of worth or merit. God, insisted Servetus, condemns no one who does not condemn himself through thought, word or deed. To Calvin, who had written the fiery Institutes of the Christian Religion, Servetus' latest book was a slap in the face. The irate Calvin sent a copy of his own book as his reply. Servetus promptly returned it, thoroughly annotated with insulting observations.
Calvin wrote to Servetus, "I neither hate you nor despise you; nor do I wish to persecute you; but I would be as hard as iron when I behold you insulting sound doctrine with so great audacity."
In time their correspondences grew more heated until Calvin ended it. Whereupon Servetus bombarded Calvin with several extraordinarily unfriendly letters. Thus Calvin's antagonism against Servetus seems to have been based not simply on his unorthodox views but also on Servetus's tone of superiority mixed with personal abuse. Calvin stated of Servetus, when writing to his friend William Farel on 13 February 1546:
"Servetus has just sent me a long volume of his ravings. If I consent he will come here, but I will not give my word for if he comes here, if my authority is worth anything, I will never permit him to depart alive
("Si venerit, modo valeat mea autoritas, vivum exire nunquam patiar").
Modern relevanceDue to his rejection of the Trinity and eventual execution by burning for heresy, Servetus is often regarded as the first (modern) Unitarian martyr by Unitarians. Other modern non-trinitarian groups, such as Jehovah's Witnesses, Christadelphians and Oneness Pentecostalism, also claim Servetus as a spiritual ancestor.
Servetus' influence on the beginnings of the Unitarian movement in Poland and Transylvania has been confirmed by scholars, and two Unitarian Universalist congregations are named after him, in Minnesota and Washington. A church window is also dedicated to Servetus at the .
Oneness Pentecostalism identifies with Servetus' teaching on the divinity of Jesus Christ and his insistence on the one God, rather than a Trinity of three distinct persons: "And because His Spirit was wholly God He is called God, just as from His flesh He is called man"
The theology of Servetus also has many affinities with that of Swedenborg.
Servetus was the first European to describe the function of pulmonary circulation, although it was not widely recognized at the time, for a few reasons. One was that the description appeared in a theological treatise, Christianismi Restitutio, not in a book on medicine. Further, most copies of the book were burned shortly after its publication in 1553. Three copies survived, but these remained hidden for decades. It was not until William Harvey's dissections in 1616 that the function of pulmonary circulation was widely accepted by physicians. It is increasingly recognized that the discovery of pulmonary circulation was made 300 years earlier by Ala-al-Din Abu al-Hasan Ali Ibn Abi al-Hazm al-Qarshi al-Dimashqi (known as Ibn Al-Nafis) who was born in 1213 A.D. in Damascus.
In 1984, a Zaragoza public hospital changed its name from José Antonio to Miguel Servet. It is now a university hospital. Most Spanish cities also include at least a street, square or park named after Servetus.
Further reading- Jean Calvin, (Defense of Orthodox Faith against the Prodigious Errors of the Spaniard Michael Servetus…), Geneva, 1554.
- Hunted Heretic: The Life and Death of Michael Servetus 1511–1553 by Roland H. Bainton. Revised Edition edited by Peter Hughes with an introduction by Ángel Alcalá. . ISBN 0-9725017-3-8.
- Out of the Flames: The Remarkable Story of a Fearless Scholar, a Fatal Heresy, and One of the Rarest Books in the World by Lawrence Goldstone and Nancy Goldstone. ISBN 0-7679-0837-6.
- by Marian Hillar, 2003. ISBN 0761824006.
- by Marian Hillar, 1997. ISBN 0773485724.
- The Heretics: Heresy Through the Ages by Walter Nigg. Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1962. (Republished by . ISBN 0-88029-455-8)
- The History and Character of Calvinism by John T. McNeill, New York: Oxford University Press, 1954. ISBN 0-19-500743-3.
- , Carlisle, Penn: , 1980. ISBN 0-85151-323-9.
- with WorldCat. Contains seventy letters of Calvin, several of which discuss his plans for, and dealings with, Servetus. Also includes his final discourses and his last will and testament (April 25, 1564).
- Jules Bonnet, , 2 vols., 1855, 1857, Edinburgh, Thomas Constable and Co.: Little, Brown, and Co., Boston—The Internet Archive
- by William Simpson, San Francisco: E.D. Beattle, 1900. Excerpts from letters of Servetus, written from his prison cell in Geneva (1553), pp. 30–31. Google Books.
- A complete translation of Christianismi Restitutio into English (the first ever) by Christopher Hoffman and Marian Hillar was published on April 30, 2007.
See also
External links- , from the Dictionary of Unitarian and Universalist Biography
- .Philip Schaff. History of the Christian Church, Vol. 8, chapter 16.
- - mention of Calvin and Servetus.
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- . Comments and quotes.
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