From: hedrick@farside.rutgers.edu (Charles Hedrick)
Newsgroups: talk.religion.misc
Subject: Re: Calvin
Date: 20 Dec 92 03:41:21 GMT
Distribution: world,public
Organization: Rutgers Univ., New Brunswick, N.J.

dgraham@bmers30.bnr.ca (Douglas Graham) writes:

>If my source is correct, then you are vastly downplaying Calvin's
>role in the whole sordid ordeal.  According to George Smith's
>_Atheism, Ayn Rand, and Other Heresies_:

I didn't include this portion because I was out of reach of my
reference books.  Sorry.

>    While hiding in France under an assumed name, Servetus sent a
>  manuscript copy of his last book (The Resurrection of Christianity)
>  to Calvin in Geneva.  Servetus apparently hoped the great Reformer
>  would view the book sympathetically -- a naive and fatal miscalculation.
>  Calvin never returned the manuscript; he had a better use for it.
>  He gave four incriminating pages to a colleague, Guillaume Trie,
>  who forwarded them to a Catholic correspondent in France.  Trie also
>  revealed the true identity of "Villanovanus," the psuedonym used
>  by Servetus.  The Protestant Trie chided Catholics for tolerating
>  this heretic in their midst: ...

Indeed.  What this fails to say is that Servetus and Calvin had been
corresponding for some time, without Calvin revealing him to the
Inquisition.  Calvin certainly agreed to expose him.  (Note that I'm
not saying Calvin is blameless, just that when looked at in context of
the times, there's no reason to single him out.)  However as far as I
can tell, he didn't instigate this, as even your account indicates.
He claimed that Trie got copies of the incriminating documents out of
him only with some reluctance.

>>He opposed
>>burning, believing a more humane method of execution should be used.

>Correct me if I'm wrong, but it's my understanding that Calvin
>pretty much ran Geneva at the time.  If he hadn't wanted Servetus
>burned, then Servetus wouldn't have been burned.

Huh?  Calvin was a pastor.  Geneva was run by a civil government.
They even expelled Calvin for a period of time because he had ruffled
too many feathers.  Doesn't sound to me like he ran Geneva.  It's hard
to know how strongly he fought -- probably not strongly enough -- but
it's not my impression that Calvin alone could have stopped the
execution.  Indeed at the time of the trial, Calvin's influence was at
a low.  Servetus asked for Calvin's goods and house to be awarded to
him, and apparently thought he might get it!  Note also that the
council did not want to take sole responsibility for the decision.
Before agreeing to an execution, they sent letters to Zurich, Bern,
Basel, and Schaffhausen.  All agreed.  Bullinger had already said that
he should be killed.  Bern replied that in Bern the penalty would be
death by fire.  We already know the Catholic verdict.  You really
can't hang the verdict on Calvin.

>But according to Smith, Calvin was even less tolerant than Luther,
>and that's saying a lot:
>    Calvin was the hardest among the hard-liners.  Under no circumstances
>  should secular authorities tolerate heretics and blasphemers.  Indeed,
>  "Those who would spare heretics and blasphemers are themselves
>  blasphemers."  Such "implacable severity" is required because "devotion
>  to God's honor should be preferred to all human concerns."  And, in
>  pursuit of this end, we "should expunge from memory our mutual humanity"
>  as we exterminate heretics with righteous zeal.

I'm not familiar with this quotation.  Calvin wrote a work defending
the execution of Servetus, which is not among the high points in his
theology.  I suspect the quotations were from that.  There's a certain
smell of "methinks he does protest too much".  The fact that he says
we need to expunge our humanity when dealing with heretics shows signs
of an underlying guilty conscience, I think.  However if you look at
the practice in Geneva, I don't think you'll find justification for
this judgement.  Luther sanctioned a war against the Baptists, which
involved far more bloodshed than the one case in which Calvin was
involved.  In my opinion, the only real good guys during this period
were the Baptists.  (You'll see them called "anabaptists" in the older
history books, but that name is an insult.)  Unfortunately after a few
decades of persecution, after many of their leaders had been killed,
they were goaded into violence too.  Altogether it was not a good
period for tolerance (not that there had been many good periods for
tolerance since Constantine).

In fact the main difference between Calvin and Luther is not
persecution of heretics (an area in which Luther's record is worse)
but discipline of their own adherents.  The ideal in Geneva was for
the whole town to be a church.  At this time, churches had strong
ideals of church discipline: modestry in clothing, moderation in
alcohol, opposition to gambling, etc.  The church in Geneva attempted
to enforce all of these ideals, with the town councils cooperating.
It's not so unusual in the U.S.  for a church to try to enforce these
kinds of ideals of their members.  However it *was* unusual to try it
with a whole town.  The laws existed even among the Catholics, but
they were never enforced.  Calvin and the other pastors got involved
in all kinds of details, including education, safety, pay for
laborers, etc.  Many of their ideas did them credit, but citizens who
weren't committed Christians (or Protestants) found some of it quite
oppressive.

Luther never tried this sort of thing.  There were differences in the
political situation.  It's a lot harder to do this sort of thing with
a whole country than a city.  Nor is there any indication that any
political entity that Luther was involved with wanted to become a
Christian utopia of quite the sort that Geneva had in mind.  As far as
I can tell, the Geneva experience was not just Calvin -- he was called
to be a leader in Geneva by a group that already had in mind creating
the sort of community that resulted.  And the ideal did not seem to
require his personal presence.  If you're interested in these issues,
I recommend the relevant chapters from McNeill's "The History and
Character of Calvinism".  It gives enough background about the
politics in Geneva to let you understand the environment in which
Calvin worked.  Certainly Calvin agreed with what was done, so if you
think it's a bad thing, you will surely believe he's guilty.  But he
was not a dictator, and the situation in Geneva was not his personal
creation.

>>Catholics in Geneva were booted out, not killed.
>>Servetus was regarded as a political danger as well as a heretic,
>Not according to Smith:
>    The execution of Servetus marked a turning point in the history of
>  toleration.  True, disposing of heretics was nothing new to Protestants,
>  but their previous judicial murders had been defended primarily on
>  political grounds.  Servetus threatened no one politically; the brilliant
>  intellectual was burned solely for heresy, and fellow Protestants had
>  lit the fire.  This spectacle appalled a handful of Protestant humanists,
>  including the Frenchman Sebastion Castellio.

This evaluation is however from a liberal perspective.  I agree with
it, but Calvin and other Protestant leaders were operating under
different assumptions.  The issue was not just personal beliefs, but
rather someone who was publishing books attacking the Trinity and
infant baptism, and mocking Christian leaders.  Remember that
Christianity was at that time considered the foundation of the State.
Thus he was viewed as a political danger.

>Even worse than slow burning?
Yes.  I think it's fair to believe that the Inquisition would have
done their best to force Servetus to recant before killing him.  While
the prison conditions in Geneva weren't wonderful, there was no
torture other than the final execution, and he was given a theological
hearing that was a genuine attempt to deal with his views.  One can
very easily come up with worse fates.

The reason I think this issue is important is somewhat of a paradox.
It's precisely because I value toleration that I do not want people to
think of Calvin as a monster.  The danger of stereotyping Calvin and
others is that we no longer have to face the implications for us.  If
Geneva killed Servetus because it was under the control of a monster,
then we don't have anything to worry about.  But if Calvin was a
responsible Christian leader doing his best to carry out the
implications of the faith, then we have to look a bit more carefully
at the roots of intolerance.  Otherwise we may end up doing the same.
Intolerance is something that must be dealt with by each community.
As long as atheists blame Christians for being persecuters,
Protestants blame Catholics for the Inquisition, and we all think
those involved were monsters, none of us have to face any hard
questions ourselves.
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