Out of the Flames

by Lawrence Goldstone

  Osler was one of the few champions of Servetus who was himself a Protestant and an admirer of Calvin. In the lecture, he said:

  Much scorn has been heaped upon the great reformer, and one cannot but regret that a man of such magnificent achievements should have been dragged into a miserable heresy hunt like a common inquisitor… But let the long record of a self-denying life, devoted in an evil generation to the highest and the best, wipe for all reasonable men this one blot. Let us, if we may judge him at all, do so as a man, not as a demi-god. We cannot defend him, let us not condemn him.

  Still, Osler was most responsible, even more than Voltaire, for gaining some measure of credit, at least among medical historians, for Servetus and his discovery.

  The modern world [is finally recognizing] the merits of one of the strangest figures on the rich canvas of the sixteenth century. The wandering Spanish scholar, the stormy disputant, the anatomical pro-sector, the mystic dreamer of a restored Christianity, the discoverer of one of the fundamental facts of physiology, has come at last to his own. There are those, I know, who feel that perhaps more than justice has been done; but in a tragic age Servetus played an unusually tragic part, and the pathos of his fate appeals strongly to us… he remained faithful unto death to what he believed was the Truth.

  Osler's son Edward was killed in the trenches of France in 1917. He was only twenty-two years old. A number of Osler's friends were serving in the medical corps when Edward was wounded by shrapnel, and they tried desperately to save him. When he died, they hesitated before informing Osler. He was sixty-eight and in weakening health, and his son was the most important thing in his life. Two years later, a shattered William Osler was dead.

  With Osler gone, Michael Servetus once more dipped below the waves of history.

  EPILOGUE

  THE GROWTH OF human knowledge has always depended on individuals of immense talent and passion who have struggled to evoke fundamental change in the way we see our world. Those who succeeded, like Einstein, Newton, Shakespeare, or Picasso, have become our most respected figures. We often forget, however, that in many cases those changes we now so unconditionally embrace were resisted fiercely by the reigning orthodoxies of their times, and that many of those whom we now consider visionaries were ridiculed and reviled until the force of their vision overwhelmed the concentrated ignorance around them.

  But there were also those, no less brilliant, who did not succeed, whose ideas could not take root before they were crushed. Their vision and passion were no less intense, and what they had to say no less vital to the human spirit. It was only circumstance that separated them from the others.

  Michael Servetus was one of those great, overlooked figures. With kinder turns of fate, he might well have changed the course of history in not one but two fields—first, by ushering in a simpler, purer, and more generous Christianity and, second, by prompting a more curious and effective medical science. Instead, Michael Servetus was hunted down and burned at the stake.

  His execution marked a turning point in the quest for freedom of expression. Although thousands had been executed for heresy before him and others would be executed after, the extraordinary nature of both Servetus the man and Servetus the representative of honest and passionate dissent rippled through Europe in ways that his enemies had never foreseen.

  Servetus's detractors, and indeed some of his supporters, have denounced him as an extremist—obsessed, inflexible, and blind to the forces around him. Yet it was these very qualities that compelled his refusal to compromise his beliefs even unto death. And it was that refusal, in turn, that drove his enemies to drop their mask of righteousness and exert the full force of repression to silence him. And so the Servetus trial stands with other, similar affairs like the Dreyfus case and the Scopes trial as a testament to courage of conscience. These cases become starting points at which other champions of justice and fairness may draw a line and say, “This was wrong.”

  Even so, had he lived just a century earlier, Servetus might have ended up a forgotten figure, or at best a myth. The difference for him was the development of printing and the spread of books. The three copies of Christianismi Restitutio that survived virtually became surrogates for their author, going into hiding and relying on secret supporters for protection until, centuries later, they could be safely read and appreciated. The book kept alive the spirit of the man and the evidence of his genius, so that other men of similar spirit and genius—Leibniz, Voltaire, Priestley, Jefferson, and Osler—might draw inspiration from Servetus's unsparing quest for truth. Today, 450 years later, we are richer for it.

  THE UNIVERSITY OF PARIS Medical School building where Servetus followed Vesalius as Guinter's assistant still stands on the rue de Bûcherie. It is now owned by the city of Paris and is used as a center to provide various public services to the populace. The surgical theater in which both men performed the dissections that propelled anatomy into the modern age is now part of a travel agency for senior citizens. The room is clean, freshly painted white, and bare save for a circular display stand in the middle containing vacation brochures.

  In Geneva, in a park just outside the walls of the old city, there is a famous monument to the Reformation, to which thousands of tourists make a pilgrimage every year. In the center are four figures, each about fifteen feet high, cut from pinkish stone. Second from the left, slighter taller than Farel to his right and Knox and Beza to his left, is the dominant figure of Calvin, glowering down on visitors. There are stone murals to either side depicting other heroes of Protestantism, and there are two large blocks of stone at either end, one inscribed Luther and the other Zwingli. The monument is spotlessly clean, and a small moat has been set in front to prevent anyone from giving in to the temptation to add a touch of graffiti.

  On the walls of the Hôtel de Ville (city hall) in the center of the old city is a series of murals depicting the stages of Genevan history, the most prominent being that which commemorates Calvin's Geneva welcoming the flood of refugees from Catholic oppression in the mid-sixteenth century.

  Streets in Geneva are named for the city's heroes and luminaries. There is a rue Jean Calvin, of course, and a rue Guillaume Farel, both in the center of the old city. There is, however, no rue Berthelier or rue Perrin, even though each of those families was instrumental in overthrowing the rule of Savoy and gaining the independence without which Calvin's efforts at reform would have been impossible. In fact, there is little evidence at all that a great and brave struggle for freedom ever took place here. For most visitors, seeing only the huge sculpture of Calvin or the murals on the Hôtel de Ville, it would seem that Genevan history began in 1536.

  The stone tablet memorializing Servetus still stands. It is so well hidden amidst untended trees and bushes that in the reference volume in Geneva's own tourism agency, it is called “the lost monument.” To discover Servetus's name still requires the twenty-foot hike up the steep hill through the weeds. The rue Michel Servet survives as well. It is a grimy, two-block-long thoroughfare running down from the Plateau de Champel, past a gas station and the backs of some buildings, toward the hospital. Underneath Servetus's name reads simply, “Spanish physician.” The Plateau de Champel is now a small public park. There is a fountain with a number of signs that forbid bathing, and it is advisable to keep to the paths because local residents assiduously ignore the many admonitions to curb their dogs.

  After the fall of France in World War II, the monument to Servetus in Annemasse was taken down by order of a mayor appointed by the Vichy government. After numerous efforts by the Roch family in Switzerland to buy back the sculpture, it was eventually melted down for scrap the following year. The stone panels were destroyed. In 1956, the town organized a committee to reerect the monument. Two years later, 411,500 francs had been raised, most of it from area residents. Two years after that, the new monument was ready. The mock-up that Clothilde Roch had used as the model for the original had been retained by her family, and this was used to recast the
sculpture. Three of the four panels were recut exactly as the originals. The rear panel, however, which had previously contained the quote from Voltaire, was replaced by one that read, “Erected for the first time in 1908, given over to the Germans in 1942, this statue was reestablished by public subscription and dedicated once more on 4 September 1960.” It now stands, as had the original, in an open, attractive plaza in front of city hall.

  Voltaire's château lies just outside the center of Ferney-Voltaire, as the town is now named, a small, toney little hamlet, with shops such as La Lingerie and Rodier lining the main street. The château is a museum and the grounds are often used for plays or concerts. On the tour, the Calas case is described in detail, but there is no mention of Servetus. The mountainside leading down to Lake Geneva is covered with tall pine trees rather than the vineyards of Voltaire's time, so it is no longer possible to see the city or the Plateau de Champel from the windows.

  The Unitarian Church in the United States is small, with only about 200,000 active members, but it is an accepted and vibrant part of American religious life. Michael Servetus is considered the spiritual inspiration for the movement, and almost every important history of Uni-tarianism begins with his story.

  The Unitarian community in Cluj, Transylvania, continues to persevere.

  HISTORY IS AN OCEAN that books help us to navigate. It is the permanence of the printed word that has allowed ideas to travel from place to place, from age to age. It is easy to dismiss the sixteenth century as the distant past, but Servetus, Calvin, Luther, Erasmus, Charles, Francis, and the rest were dealing with the forces of an emerging technology much as we are today. The power of unleashed expression is not unique to the electronic age.

  Today, the three copies of Christianismi Restitutio can still be found at the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek in Vienna, the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, and the library of the University of Edinburgh.

  BIBLIOGRAPHIC NOTES

  FOR A FIGURE as ignored by history as Michael Servetus, there is a wealth of material to be had, both by and about him. In 1953 the theological historian Roland Bainton published Hunted Heretic: The Life and Death of Michael Servetus (1511–1553), a biography on which he worked, on and off, for thirty years. Marian Hillar, in 1997, published the much more comprehensive The Case of Michael Servetus (1511–1553): The Turning Point in the Struggle for Freedom of Conscience. Hillar, a Polish expatriate and Socinian scholar, is vitriolic in his denunciations of both Calvin and the Catholic Church, but there is no doubting the depth of his research. Still perhaps the most useful work on Servetus remains the 1877 Servetus and Calvin by Robert Willis, M.D., which provides an extraordinary record of the trial at Geneva, taken from city records, and that of Vienne, from the transcription by l'Abbé d'Artigny in 1749. Further records of the trial are provided in An Impartial History of Michael Servetus, Burnt Alive at Geneva for Heresie penned anonymously in 1724 by an author whose identity was never firmly established, although his information was confirmed by later scholarship.

  Lesser works abound. Servetus has fascinated scholars for centuries, and there is no shortage of commentary on his life and work. Osler's lecture has been transcribed and published, and there are articles and citations too numerous to mention. Of particular utility to us were David Cuthbertson's A Tragedy of the Reformation, a history of the Edinburgh copy of Christianismi Restitutio; John F. Fulton's Michael Servetus: Humanist and Martyr; Michael Servetus and the Discovery of the Circulation of the Bloodby John Knott; and Michael Servetus, His Life and Teachings by Carl Theophilus Odhner.

  As for Servetus's own work, there is an equal wealth of sources. The Unitarian scholar Earl Morse Wilbur translated both Errors of the Trinity and Two Dialogues on the Trinity in their entirety, and these provide the most concise and revealing source for insights into Servetus's points of view about the nature of God, His role in our lives, the sanctity of the Scriptures, and the distortions perpetrated on them by one Catholic or Protestant theologian after another. These arguments, set down when Servetus was nineteen, remained the cornerstone of his beliefs for his entire life. Charles D. O'Malley translated, in whole or in part, a number of Servetus's other works, among them the Syrups, the Geography, the Apology for Fuchs, and, most importantly, the section of Christianismi Restitutio in which pulmonary circulation was first discussed.

  With the exception of the original Christianismi Restitutio, copies of Servetus's actual work are also widely available. We were fortunate to live within a half hour's drive of Yale University, which, between the Beinecke and the Whitney/Cushing Medical Library, has one of the best Servetus collections in the world.

  As for Servetus's nemesis, John Calvin, the range of available material is obviously even greater. In addition to Émile Domergue's compendious seven-volume biography Jean Calvin, there are a number of one-volume works that were quite useful. Hugh Y. Reyburn's vastly underrated 1914 study, John Calvin: His Life, Letters, and Work, was of particular utility in that the author walked a middle ground between the fawning apologies of Calvin's supporters and the blind denunciations of his detractors. Among the former, T. H. L. Parker's John Calvin: A Biography provided a good deal of personal history, while John T. McNeill's The History and Character of Calvinism was an excellent source of philosophic and theological background information. Quirinus Breen's John Calvin: A Study in French Humanism provided insights into Calvin's formative years. Calvin's own work was invaluable, of course. Virtually everything he wrote has been translated. In addition to Institutes of the Christian Religion, we made great use of The Register of the Company of Pastors in Geneva in the Time of Calvin, translated by Philip E. Hughes, a detailed record of city ordinances and legislative and judicial decisions from 154.1 through 1566, which also contains a large section on the Servetus affair.

  For the origins and early days of printing, the British Library publishes a number of useful works, including S. H. Steinberg's Five Hundred Years of Printing and The Gutenberg Bible by Martin Davies. While just about every work on the history of books, reading, or printing contains some amount of material on Aldus, Paul Grendler's monograph Aldus Manutius: Humanist, Teacher, and Printer and Martin Lowry's The World of Aldus Manutius: Business and Scholarship in Renaissance Venice paint the most vivid pictures of both the man and the world in which he toiled.

  As to the two ferocious adversaries Charles V and Francis I, three works stand above the rest—William Robertson's brilliant and timeless classic The History of the Reign of the Emperor Charles V, which has not been matched in over two centuries; R. J. Knecht's Renaissance Warrior and Patron: The Reign of Francis I; and Francis Hackett's Francis the First: First Gentleman of France. Of the latter two, the first is notable for its detail and the second for its wit and tone, which capture uncannily the spirit of an absolute monarch who often thought and behaved like a petulant eight-year-old.

  The genesis and growth of the Unitarian movement were chronicled in depth by Earl Morse Wilbur in Our Unitarian Heritage in 1925. More recently, David Bumbaugh, a professor at Meadville-Lombard University in Chicago, has provided a shorter but eminently readable volume entitled Unitarian Universalism: A Narrative History. The work of Conrad Wright, professor emeritus at Harvard, is always worth reading, as is The Epic of Unitarianism, edited by David Parke, a compilation of excerpts by the most prominent figures of the movement. For an overall picture of theological dissent and the development of liberal Christian ideology, see J. M. Robertson's excellent A History of Freethought: Ancient and Modern to the Period of the French Revolution

  An overview of the history of medicine can be found in Fielding H. Garrison's An Introduction to the History of Medicine. For the evolution of medical education in the United States, see American Medical Schools and the Practice of Medicine: A History by William G. Rothstein and The Education of American Physicians: Historical Essays edited by Ronald L. Numbers. For earlier medicine, Charles D. O'Malley's Andreas Vesalius of Brussels paints a vivid portrait of the great anatomi
st and his times.

  For the life of William Osler, two biographies rule the field. They are Michael Bliss's recent William Osler: A Life in Medicine, which, as the title implies, leans heavily toward Osler's professional life, and Harvey Cushing's massive 1925 Pulitzer Prize-winning The Life of Sir William Osler. Cushing, a brilliant brain surgeon in his own right, undertook the project to honor his friend and compiled virtually every letter, note, and scrap of paper written by, to, or about Osler, producing a sometimes elephantine chronicle. Still, wading through Cushing's work often provides glimpses into Osler's character, perspective, and sense of humor that the shorter book cannot. Osler's original work, the famed textbook Principles and Practice of Medicine, but also A Way of Life and, of course, his essay on Servetus, are useful not simply for content but also for the feel they provide for a man who was a mix of Victorian gentleman and single-minded reformer.

  SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Aiton, E. J., Leibniz: A Biography (Bristol, England, 1985; Adam Hilger).

  Aldridge, A. Owen, Voltaire and the Century of Light (Princeton, N.J, 1975; Princeton University Press)

  Allen, Gay Wilson, Waldo Emerson (New York, 1981; Viking)