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Adler, answer. It will not do to say that those were different times. A thousand voices were raised against the wanton and cruel murder of Servetus, but Calvin's was not among them.
The awful fate of Servetus, the interesting character of the man, and the fact that he came so near to anticipating the discoveries of Harvey make him one of the most interesting figures in medical history.
He did not discover that the blood moved, that was known to Aristotle and to Galen, from both of whom I have given quotations which indicate clearly that they knew of its movement, but at the time of Harvey not a single anatomist had escaped from the domination of Galen's views. Both Servetus and Colombo knew of the pulmonary circulation, which was described by the former in very accurate terms.
Maybe he had denied something that some idiot said was true; may be he had a discussion a division of opinion with a man, like John Calvin. John Calvin said Christ was the Eternal Son of God and Michael Servetus said that Christ was the son of the Eternal God. That was the only difference of opinion. Think of it! What an important thing it was! How it would have affected the price of food!
Michael Servetus, a very learned Spanish physician who perhaps discovered the circulation of the blood before Harvey, disbelieved in the Trinity and in the divinity of Jesus, and, as he was a Platonist, perceived no intermediaries between God and man save ideas.
There was no charm for him in the bigoted ferocity of Calvin's lean, dark face, smacking his thin lips over the roasted Servetus. He abhorred the departed heroes of the golden evolution from Eidegenossen into Higuerios and later Huguenots. They interested him not, neither did he love Professor Calame's scratchy pictures, nor the jumbled bric-a-brac of art and history. None of these charmed him.
Servetus was not an ordinary heretic; he was a bold pantheist, and outraged the dogma of all Christian communions by saying that God, in three persons, was a Cerberus, a monster with three heads. 2. He had already been condemned to death by the Catholic doctors at Vienne in Dauphiny. 3.
During this Reformation period there are many names of light and power, among them being Servetus, whom Calvin burned because he was a Unitarian; Laelius and Faustus Socinus, Bernardino Ochino, Blandrata, and Francis David; and, more noted in some ways than any of them, Giordano Bruno, the man who represents the dawn of the modern world more significantly than any other man of his age, not entirely a Unitarian, but fighting a battle out of which Unitarianism sprung, freedom of thought, the right of private judgment, the scientific study of the universe, the attempt, unhampered by the Church's dogma or power, to understand the world in which we live.
It would not do to have the common people understand that a man could deny the bible, refuse to kiss the cross; contend that humanity was greater than Christ, and then die as sweetly as Torquemada did after pouring molten lead into the ears of an honest man, or as calmly as Calvin after he had burned Servetus, or as peacefully as King David after advising with his last breath one son to assassinate another.
And Luther, all of whose works were condemned to be burnt by the Diet of Worms , actually survived their burning twenty-five years, though he himself had publicly burnt at Wittenberg Leo X.'s bull, anathematising his books, as well as the Decretals of previous Popes. Less fortunate than these were the famous martyrs of free thought, Dolet, Servetus, and Tyndale.
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