The revolutionary impulse to try to change the way people think is inevitably more or less coercive, as is the counterrevolutionary impulse to prevent or suppress new thinking. This is a fallen world. Geneva became the model or laboratory of Reform civilization, which otherwise could not have discovered its own implications or its own coherency or viability as a social ethos, nor developed its own institutions. This same experiment, the creation of a new social order, has been tried repeatedly in our century, usually with horrific consequences, beside which Genevan rigors and excesses are surely very mild indeed.
Cauvin’s special reputation for severity was established by the burning of Michael Servetus for heresy. Cauvin did not serve on the tribunal which condemned Servetus, but he did approve of the sentence of death, even in anticipation of Servetus’s arrival in Geneva. He is associated with only this one such death, though he did use his influence to have an enemy of his banished and another forced to walk around the city twice in his bare feet and shirttails. Of course, the assent to the killing of Servetus is absolutely deplorable, but precious few who have figured in religious and political history as significantly as Cauvin did, in his time or in ours, have only one life to answer for. This is not exculpation — he of all people should have had advanced views about tolerance toward heresy, he being a great promulgator of heresy by the lights of those who traditionally made such judgments. It is fair to remember, however, that his association with the killing of Servetus was an anomaly in his career.
A friend of Servetus, Sebastiano Castellio, attacked Cauvin very powerfully for approving and then defending in principle the punishment of heresy as a crime. So far as I can discover, Cauvin’s defense has not been published in English, except for the excerpts which are quoted by Castellio for the purposes of rebuttal. This is no doubt a thing for which Cauvin should be grateful. The consequence of the whole affair was that the practice of religious and intellectual repression was vigorously attacked, and was not effectively defended. Nothing better could have come of it.
But the issue of repression, or of freedom, is obliquely illuminated by Castellio. His rhetoric implies that Cauvin invented the idea that heretics should be persecuted. Yet he argues that for the sake of consistency Cauvin ought to have been punishing Catholics as heretics — which reminds us that he did not — or at least “he ought to have apprehended the Cardinal Tournon when shortly before the death of Servetus he went through Geneva, on his way, as all know, to burn the godly men who lay in chains at Lyons, and whom not long after he did burn.” This event was clearly graver than the death of Servetus by the factor of the undisclosed number of godly men, but Castellio wishes to isolate Cauvin with the scandal of persecution, so he does not pause over this fact. The success of Castellio in making Cauvin seem peculiarly and monstrously bent on persecution lingers as the darkest element in the modern reputation of John Calvin.
Another attack on Cauvin’s inconsistent practice of repression — a rhetorically interesting use of the fact that it was not characteristic of him — casts further light on the subject of the repressiveness of Geneva. Castellio asks, “Why does he not prohibit the printing and sale of other pernicious books at Geneva? Aristotle is allowed, though he denies the foremost article of the creed, the creation of the world. The Koran is permitted and Apuleius, Martial, Plautus, Terence, Horace, Catullus, Tibullus, Propertius, and other nefarious corrupters of morals. Ovid’s Art of Love — that is, of Adultery — is allowed, as well as the words of his imitator Clément Marot … What shall I say of the trash that is printed there?” We can say that it is Renaissance and humanist and not evidence of a generally repressive atmosphere.
Why was Servetus executed in Geneva? His writings were so perfectly calculated to offend prevailing Christian opinion that if the authorities had simply sent him on his way he would surely have met the same end somewhere else. As was customary, at the time of his trial the Genevans solicited the views of the magistrates of neighboring cities, all of whom concurred in their judgment. They even sent queries to the Inquisition in Vienna. Though Cauvin appealed for a more humane method of execution, Servetus was burned, and so were his books. His famous, fatal book was an attack on the doctrine of the Trinity. To the end, Servetus could have saved his life by repeating a phrase to the effect that Christ was a person of the Trinity, but with touching courage he refused to do it.
Heresy implies orthodoxy. The trial and execution of Servetus defined important limits to Calvinist departure from Catholic teaching. Such limits were necessary if his movement was to be regarded as a reform of Christian practice and tradition rather than as an abandonment of them. If Cauvin were not simply to release the centrifugal energies contained by mystery and complexity and paradox, he had to make clear which things were to be kept as well as which were to be rejected. The doctrine of the Trinity, reconciling belief in the divinity of Christ to belief in the unity of God, was vulnerable because it does not have an unambiguous basis in Scripture — in Reform theory Scripture was the standard to be applied to everything. Then, too, Manicheanism was a virtual synonym for heresy because it had been attacked as such by Augustine, so nonconformists were usually accused of it. And parts of Europe very receptive to Calvinism had, centuries before, been very receptive to Catharism, which resembled the older Manichean heresy in that it asserted the existence of a “true God” and an evil god, the latter being the creator of the physical world, which was therefore essentially evil as well. So this kind of dualism is what Cauvin might have expected his followers to be accused of, and also, perhaps, to be predisposed to. He had had to defend himself, early in his stay in Geneva, against a charge that he denied the Trinity.
So the trial and death of Servetus would have clarified Cauvin’s position on that point, once and for all, for his detractors and for his supporters as well. This is no extenuation. Nor is Cauvin justified by the fact that his attacks on Servetus in the Institutes coincide with, or are the occasion for, the distinctive understanding of the Old Testament which allowed Jews and Judaism to flourish in safety in Calvinist societies as they could not anywhere else in European Christendom. (I know it is customary to remark that these societies were rewarded for such “tolerance” — why have we never found a better word? — with prosperity, the implication being that the motives behind it were grasping, which would in turn imply that persecutors of Jews acted from loftier motives. It is customary also to trace this decency to a source in Cauvin’s theology. But cynics and mercantilists are not notoriously inclined to turn to systematic theology for guidance. So it seems reasonable to consider it a benign consequence of the singular reverence with which he regarded the covenant relationship between God and the Jewish people.) Servetus, like the Cathars before him, insisted that the God of the New Testament did not reveal himself to the ancient Hebrews. The God of the Old Testament was for the Cathars the evil creator. For Servetus — here I am following Cauvin’s account — he was an angel they mistook for God, and his covenant with the Jews was entirely this-worldly. Cauvin makes the argument at great length that justification by faith is as central to the Old Testament as to the New: “For the same reason it follows that the Old Testament was established upon the free mercy of God, and was confirmed by Christ’s intercession … Who, then, dares to separate the Jews from Christ, since with them, we hear, was made the covenant of the gospel, the whole foundation of which is Christ? Who dares to estrange from the gift of free salvation those to whom we hear the doctrine of the righteousness of faith was imparted?” Again, he says, in Corinthians Paul “makes the Israelites equal to us not only in the grace of the covenant but also in the signification of the sacraments … For Paul here means to disabuse Christians of thinking they are superior to the Jews through the privilege of baptism.” (In fairness to the Cathars, who have had little enough fairness — despite what is said to have been their view of the Old Testament, the culture in which they flourished seems to have had amicable relations with Jews. An important center of Talmud studies in the south of France, in which Sephardic and Ashkenazic influences were both active, was destroyed together with the Cathars, and a condition of surrender for nobility who had defended Cathars was that they must no longer employ Jews.)