Note 68 — Chapter XII · THE REFORMATION AND FREETHOUGHT

Calvin’s guilt in the matter begins with his devices to have Servetus seized by the Catholic authorities of Lyons68—to set misbelievers, as he regarded them, to slay the misbeliever—and his use of Servetus’s confidential letters against him.69 He was not repelling a heresy from his own city, but heretic-hunting far away in sheer malignity. The Catholics were the less cruel gaolers, and let their prisoner escape, condemning him to death at Vienne in absence. After some months of wandering he had the temerity to seek to pass into Italy by way of Geneva, and was there at length recognized, and arrested. After a long trial he was sentenced to be burned alive (Oct. 27, 1553). The trial at Geneva is a classic document in the records of the cruelties committed in honour of chimeras; and Calvin’s part is the sufficient proof that the Protestant could hold his own with the Catholic Inquisitor in the spirit of hate.70 It has been urged, in his excuse, that the doctrines of Servetus were blasphemously put; but in point of fact Calvin passed some of his bitterest denunciation on the statement, cited (from Lorenz Friese) in a note in Servetus’s edition of Ptolemy’s Geography, that Judea is actually a barren and meagre country, and not “flowing with milk and honey.” Despite the citation of ample proof, and the plea that the passage was drawn from a previous edition, it was by Calvin adjudged blasphemous in that it “necessarily inculpated Moses and grievously outraged the Holy Spirit.”71 The language of Calvin against Servetus at this point is utterly furious. Had Servetus chanced to maintain the doctrine of the earth’s motion, he would certainly have been adjudged a blasphemer on that score also; for in the Argument to his Commentary on Genesis (1563) Calvin doggedly maintains the Ptolemaic theory. His language tells of much private freethinking around him on the Mosaic doctrine, and his tone leaves no doubt as to how he would treat published heresy on that theme. The audacity of Servetus in suggesting that the 53rd chapter of Isaiah had historical reference to Cyrus is for him anathema.72