Miguel Servetus

Miguel Servet, also called Miguel de Villanueva, Michel de Villeneuve or, in Latin, Michael Servetus, whose real name was Miguel Serveto y Conesa, alias "Revés" (Villanueva de Sigena, Aragón c. September 29, 1509 or 1511-Geneva, October 27, 1553), was a Spanish theologian and scientist.

His interests spanned many sciences: astronomy, meteorology, geography, jurisprudence, theology, physics, the study of the Bible, mathematics, anatomy, and medicine. Much of his later fame and recognition is due to his work on the pulmonary circulation described in his Christianismi Restitutio.

He participated in the Protestant Reformation and developed a Christology contrary to the Trinity. Disowned by both Catholics and Protestants, he was arrested in Geneva, put on trial, and sentenced to burn at the stake by order of the City Council and the Reformed churches of the cantons, when John Calvin's influence predominated in Geneva.

Birth and formative years

Villanueva de Sigena, home of Miguel Servet Instituto de Estudios Sijenenses "Miguel Servet"/Michael Servetus Institute and research center of his life and work.

Currently, most of Servet's biographies place his birthplace in Villanueva de Sigena, although some researchers maintain the opinion that he was born in Tudela, Navarra. attributed a Navarrese origin, while living in France under the false identity of Michel de Villeneuve. However, according to supporters of the Aragonese hypothesis, this fictitious name would allude to his true birthplace, Villanueva de Sigena, where the family home is preserved, now converted into an interpretation center.

He was the son of Antón Serveto, a noble child and notary of the Monastery of Sigena, and Catalina Conesa, who descended through the maternal line from the Zaporta Jewish-converted family. Traditional biographies give him two younger brothers: Pedro, who continued with the paternal notary, and Juan, who was ordained a priest and was rector of Poleñino. Recent studies raise the number, since in addition to Pedro and Juan, the Serveto-Conesa couple also had Francisco Serveto, who worked as a notary in the Zaragoza notary of Juan Campi; Antón Serveto, who married Ángela Ager in 1543; Catalina Serveto, wife of master Jaime Dolz, a doctor from Sariñena; and Jerónima Serveto, who in 1540 married Jaime Cardona, notary of Sariñena.

The Serveto family used a nickname, «Revés», an apparent anagram of their surname whose origin could be due to the fact that a member of a Villanueva family, probably ancient and distinguished, with the surname Revés, was related to the Servetos, thus preserving both names in later generations.

A young man with outstanding gifts for letters and a great connoisseur of Latin, Greek and Hebrew, Miguel left his hometown to further his studies, perhaps in the castle of Montearagón. He was accepted as a pupil by Fray Juan de Quintana, who would arrive to be Carlos I's confessor. After a stay to study law in Toulouse (France), where he came into contact with circles close to the Reformation for the first time, he traveled with Quintana through Italy and Germany as part of the imperial entourage and witnessed the Coronation of Carlos V as Emperor in Bologna (1530).

In 1520 he enrolled in liberal arts at the general arts studio in Zaragoza (it was not a university until 1583), where his uncle, the philosopher and mathematician Gaspar Lax, was a senior teacher. May 17, 1523, and at the end of 1524 that of teacher, at the same time that he worked as a teacher of the studio itself. A year later he already appears as one of the four arts teachers of the studio. He was attacked by his uncle Gaspar Lax in 1527, and although the specific reason is unknown, everything suggests that it could have dealt with the groundbreaking theological ideas that Servetus would have begun to share in the study, and that they were not to Lax's liking. It is also pointed out, although with less probability, the plagiarism of Gaspar Lax in his work Natural Philosophy, in which Servetus would have collaborated without appearing as a participant. His rivalry with Gaspar Lax, a powerful and renowned character at the time, closed his doors. academic doors in Spain, and it was the trigger to go to study in Toulouse.

Early Theological Works

Later, he abandoned his mentor and began a journey through various cities in Central Europe related to the rising Protestantism. He established an increasingly difficult and controversial relationship with some reforming leaders, such as Ecolampadius of Basel, and later went to Strasbourg, where he met Bucer, and to Hagenau, an Alsatian city then belonging to the Holy Roman Empire.

In 1531 he published De Trinitatis Erroribus (Of the errors about the Trinity), which caused a great scandal among the German reformers. since Servetus had the audacity to send a copy to the bishop of Zaragoza, who did not take long to request the intervention of the Inquisition. The following year he published Dialogorum de Trinitate (Dialogues on the Trinity), accompanied by a supplementary work, De Iustitia Regni Christi (On the Justice of the Kingdom of God). Another booklet attributed to Servetus, although of imprecise dating, is Declarationis Iesu Christi Filii Dei (Declaration of Jesus Christ the Son of God), also known as the "Stuttgart Manuscript".

Of the errors about the Trinity: structure and content

Edition of the Errors about the Trinity.

In this work, divided into seven books or chapters, Servetus argues that the dogma of the Trinity lacks a biblical basis, since it is not found in the Scriptures, but rather is the result of the lucubrations of «philosophers». Basing himself on abundant quotations from the Bible, Servetus concludes that Jesus is a man inasmuch as he was born of a woman, even though his birth was miraculous. In turn, Jesus is also the son of God, while his birth is the fruit of the fertilization of the Virgin Mary by the divine Logos.

So, Servetus denies that the Son is eternal, since he was generated as such in the incarnation, although he is divine by the grace of God, his Father. He, too, is thus not a Person of the Trinity, whose existence he vehemently denies, defining it as "three ghosts" or "three-headed dog Cerberus." Likewise, he describes those who believe in such a doctrine as "atheists, that is, without God " and "tritheists." In turn, the Holy Spirit would not be a third Trinitarian Person, but the force or manifestation of the spirit of God as it acts in the world through men.

Dialogues on the Trinity and on Justice: structure and content

A work of smaller size and ambition than Errores..., Diálogos is structured in two books as a fictitious conversation between two characters: Miguel (the author himself) and a certain Petruchio. According to Servetus, he writes it to clear up the doubts and concerns sown by his previous work, which in his opinion are due "to my own inexperience and the typographer's negligence." Contrary to what is stated in Errors... , Servetus says that Jesus is not only divine by grace, but also by nature, although he clarifies that only insofar as he participates in the divine substance of the father of him

In turn, in the booklet On the Justice of the Kingdom of God included at the end, he explains, among other things, the complementarity between faith and charity, because, although the justification of the believer is only through faith, charity and good works are commendable and pleasing to God, an aspect in which he clearly differs from Luther and other Protestant reformers. At the end is one of the texts by which Servetus is considered a champion of tolerance and freedom of conscience, since he affirms that

... neither with these nor with those I agree on all points, nor disagree. It seems to me that everyone has part of truth and part of error and that everyone sees the mistake of the other, but no one's... It would be easy to decide all questions if everyone was allowed to speak peacefully in the church in a desire to prophesy.

Servet, Justice..., in Complete worksVol. II-1, p. 481).

Hide Time

Miguel Servet went to Lyon. He had been briefly in Paris, where a meeting planned, but ultimately not carried out, with Calvino became the beginning of an epistolary relationship between them. Servetus arrived in Lyon with a new identity, Michel de Villeneuve, supposedly originally from Tudela de Navarra, to avoid persecution by the Inquisition. He was employed by a printing company, first as a proofreader. In 1535 he was entrusted with the publication and annotation of the Geography of Claudio Ptolemy, which he carried out giving evidence of his great erudition. In Lyon it was the happiest stage of his life. He met the doctor Symphorien Champier, who encouraged him to study medicine and he ended up going to Paris. At that time he published a treatise on Medicine against the German physician Leonhardt Fuchs (Lyon, 1536), in which he also attacked other anti-Arabist physicians, and soon after a treatise on the use of syrups (Paris, 1537). In the first, he refutes the Lutheran doctrine that salvation is obtained only by faith without works, that the syphilis of the Greeks was the same as that of the Arabs, and that syphilis was not the condition called lichen or impetigo by the ancients.

In 1537 he enrolled at the University of Paris to study medicine. There he studied alongside the great physicians of the time, teaching mathematics and medicine at the University. However, he soon found himself in difficulties, since he taught an astrology course, in which he defended the influence of the stars on future events (judiciary astrology), which, together with a booklet in which he described the use of syrups to administer the remedies of the time, he confronted him with the university community.

He left Paris again and lived in various towns in France, until in Lyon he met the Archbishop of Vienne del Dauphine, Pedro Palmier, whom he had previously met in Paris. In this way he entered his service as personal physician in 1541.

The Restitution of Christianity

Cover of his work Christianismi restitutio (1553).

In Vienne de Isère, Servetus dedicated himself to continuing his studies and publications and secretly preparing what would be his masterpiece. He continues his correspondence with Calvino, to whom he sends a first version of his book, Christianismi Restitutio (Restitution of Christianity ), fundamentally theological in character, in waiting for his comments (1546). "In it he demonstrated, on the basis of the Scriptures, that Christ was only human. " The concept of Christianity exposed there is close to pantheism. Christ is in all things. The world is full of it. He was also opposed to infant baptism, since baptism must be a mature and conscious act of Christian discipleship, which brings him closer to Anabaptist positions. On the appropriate age to receive baptism, he suggested following the example of Jesus: "Jesus Christ was himself baptized when he was about thirty years old."

Curiously, the book would go down to posterity for containing in its "Book V" the first exposition in the Christian West of the function of the pulmonary or minor circulation: according to Servetus, blood is transmitted by the pulmonary artery to the pulmonary vein by a prolonged passage through the lungs, in the course of which it turns red and is freed "of the sooty vapors by the act of expiration." Servetus maintained that the soul was an emanation of the Divinity and that it had blood as its seat. Thanks to the blood, the soul could be disseminated throughout the body, thus being able to assume the man's divine condition. Therefore, the discoveries concerning the circulation of the blood had a religious rather than a scientific impulse. Hence, the description of the pulmonary circulation is within a work of theology and not one of physiology. For Servetus there was no difference between both areas, since everything obeyed the same great divine design.

In response, Calvin tells him to read his own book Institutio religionis Christianae (Institution of the Christian Religion), published in 1536. Servetus read Calvin's book and He made very critical notes in the margins of the book, returning the corrected copy, which greatly displeased the reformer, who warned that if Servetus set foot in Geneva "he would not get out of it alive".

Finally, Christianismi Restitutio is published anonymously at the beginning of 1553, again with great scandal. A Calvinist from Geneva writes to a Catholic friend revealing that the author of the book is the heretic Michael Servet, hiding under the false identity of Villeneuve. It is suspected that Calvin himself could be behind this denunciation, who had had access to the text thanks to Servetus himself. The Lyon Inquisition receives part of the correspondence exchanged between them, after which Servetus is arrested, interrogated and imprisoned in Vienne. On April 7, however, he manages to escape and on June 17 he is sentenced to death in absentia, being burned in effigy.

Trial in Geneva and death

Monument to Servet in the square of the Town Hall of Annemasse (France), villa located 4 km from Geneva, across the French-Swiss border. The inscription under the sculpture says: to Miguel Servet, an apostle of free beliefs, born in Villanueva de Aragón on 20 September 1511, symbolically burned in Vienne by the Catholic Inquisition on 17 June 1553 and burned alive in Geneva on 27 October 1553 at the instigation of Calvin

Servetus, probably on his way to Italy, made a stopover in Geneva, where he was recognized in the church where Calvin himself preached (August 13). The city was governed by the principles of the Reformation as Calvin had defined them in his Ecclesiastical Ordinances, based on his magnum opus, Institution of the Christian religion. Servetus was arrested and tried for heresy for his denial of the Trinity and for his defense of baptism at adulthood.

Servetus suffered great hardships during his captivity, as witnessed by his letter to the Council of Geneva dated September 15, 1553. During the trial, he held various theological debates. On September 22, Servetus wrote a final statement in which he blames Calvin for making false accusations of heresy against him and requests that he too be arrested and interrogated like him, concluding: "I will be happy to die if I do not convince you so much of this." as of other things of which I accuse you below. I ask you for Justice, Gentlemen, Justice, Justice, Justice". After the process, the Reformed churches of the cantons of Zurich, Schaffhausen, Bern and Basel were consulted, after which the accused was convicted and sentenced to die at the stake on October 27, 1553. In a letter dated the previous day, Calvino commented to Farel that Servetus was going to be condemned without discussion and put to death, and he assured that he had tried to change the manner of his execution, although to no avail.

The judgment handed down against him by the Council (Petit Conseil) of Geneva reads:

Against Michael Servet of the Kingdom of Aragon, in Spain: For his book calls the Trinity demon and three-headed monsters; for it would contradict the Scriptures to say that Jesus Christ is a son of David; and to say that the baptism of the little infants is a work of witchcraft, and by many other points and articles and execrable blasphemies with which the book is thus directed against God and the sacred doctrine evangé

For these and other reasons we condemn you, M. Servet, to take you and take you to the place of Champel, to hold you to a stake and burn you alive, together with your manuscript and printed book, until your body is reduced to ashes, and so you end your days so that you remain an example for others who want to commit the same.

Baron (1989, pp. 395-398)

Consequences of the execution of Servetus

Regardless of the importance of his physiological discoveries or his work as a religious polemicist, the events that led to the trial and death of Miguel Servetus have been considered as the starting point of the discussion that led to the recognition of freedom of thought and of expression of ideas. Likewise, the Unitarian churches, which emerged from the anti-Trinitarian movements of the XVI century d. C. and later, consider Servetus their pioneer and first martyr.

The execution of Servetus shocked many thinkers throughout Europe, mainly in the Protestant sphere, who opposed killing people for reasons of faith. The Anabaptist David Joris wrote, for example, that "the true church is not the one that persecutes, but the persecuted"; He died in 1556, three years later his Anabaptist theology and his secret defense of Servetus (he used a pseudonym) were discovered, for which his body was exhumed and burned in Basel by the Protestants. Sebastián Castellion's defense of Servetus particularly stands out: «Killing a man is not defending a doctrine, it is killing a man. When the Genevans executed Servetus, they did not defend a doctrine, they killed a man". span> d. C. and the beginning of the XX, Servetus began to be claimed by supporters of free thought, who saw in his execution proof of the dangers that religious fanaticism entails, although often as a result of a superficial analysis and without taking into account the work and theological concepts of Servetus himself.

Marian Hillar, a Polish-American scholar of the work of Servetus, made the following assessment of the lasting impact the execution of the Spanish scholar had: "It was the turning point in the dominant ideology and mentality since the IV d. C.. [...] Historically speaking, with the death of Servetus, freedom of conscience ended up becoming a civil right in modern society».

Statue of Michael Servet tied to the stake of the stake. Aspirant Dunand Square in Paris.

Tributes to the memory of Miguel Servetus

Miguel Servet, work of Dionisio Lasuén, at the Paraninfo of the University of Zaragoza

Statue dedicated to Miguel Servet at the Hospital Miguel Servet in Zaragoza. Made by the Swiss sculptor Clotilde Roth in 1908.

Monument to Miguel Servet on the street Assault of Zaragoza, Spain.

Spain:

• In his hometown Villanueva de Sigena in Aragon there is a statue that represents him, located next to the village church and a studio center dedicated to Miguel Servet.
• The University Hospital of Zaragoza is named after Miguel Servet.
• In the city of Valencia an outpatient also bears its name.
• The municipal park of Huesca is called Miguel Servet.
• In many Spanish cities there are streets dedicated to Miguel Servet.

Switzerland:

• In Geneva there is a street with its name, Michel Servet, and a memorial close to the place where it was burned, erected in 1903. In addition, on October 3, 2011, a statue was opened with Servet's effigy, a copy of the statue of Annemasse, next to the previously existing monolith.

France:

• In Vienne, in the department of Isère, where Servet lived after 1540, there is a public primary school that bears its name, and where there is also a monument in its honor, made by the sculptor Joseph Bernard.

• In Paris, in the Dunand Suitor Square, in the 14th district, there is a marble statue that represents him chained to the bonfire. This statue was erected in 1908 and is the work of the sculptor Jean Baffier.

• In Annemasse there is a statue of Michel Servet in the city square, a replica of an earlier work, destroyed by the German army in the Second World War, and originally made by the sculptor Clothilde Roth.

• In Lille there is a professional liceo that bears his name.

Venezuelan:

• In the city of Maracaibo there is a school with its name.

United States:

• A universalist unitary church includes Servet in its name: the Michael Servetus Unitarian Society, in a town on the outskirts of Mineapolis (Minnesota).

Works related to Miguel Servetus

• Theatre: Blood and ash (1967) by Alfonso Sastre.

• Cinema: Passion et mort de Michel Servet (Passion and death of Miguel Servet). Directed by Claude Goretta, 1975. With Michel Cassagne on the role of Miguel Servet.

• Television: Miguel Servet, blood and ash. Series for Spanish Television directed in 1988 by José María Forqué with Juanjo Puigcorbé in the role of Miguel Servet.

• Opera: Le procès de Michel Servet (The process of Miguel Servet). Composed by Australian singer and songwriter Shauna Beesley and Swiss freetist Jean-Claude Humbert, it was premiered in Geneva on 28 October 2011.

• Historical essay: Castellio contra Calvin (1936), philosophical reflection of Stefan Zweig.

• Novel: Reconstruction Antonio Orejudo.
• Novel: The doctor heretic (2013), José Luis Corral.