Servetus, Science and the Breath of God
Honouring Servetus in Geneva, 2003, the 450th Anniversary
of his Martyrdom
Dr. Richard Boeke, Secretary, World Congress of Faiths (WCF)
“A War of Civilisations!” That is now many see
the beginning of the 21st Century since the birth of Jesus,
“The Prince of Peace.” As we enter the struggle
of faiths that is the 21st Century, it is fitting to remember
another who gave his life for what he saw to be the truth
of his science and his religion: Michael Servetus, burned
at the stake as a heretic 450 years ago.
“Jesus, thou son of the eternal God, have pity upon
me.”
These were the last words of Michael Servetus as he was burned
at the stake in Geneva, Switzerland on the 27 October 1553.
John Calvin approved the execution with the recommendation
that Servetus be beheaded, not burned alive. But like Joan
of Arc and Jan Hus, it was the flames for Heretics. As Servetus
said, “Jesus, thou son of the eternal God …”
It is recorded that Farel, one of Calvin’s fellow ministers,
said in effect, “If he would only say eternal Son of
God, we could cut him free.” If he would only affirm
that God was three separate persons, he would no longer be
a Christian Heretic.
Michael Servetus was born in Spain in 1511. He studied law
and religion at Toulouse, and medicine in Paris. In his study
of the human body, he discovered the pulmonary circulation
of the blood: that the blood goes through the lungs, is renewed
by air, and returns to the heart to be pumped out through
the arteries. He discovered the link between air and life.
In most religions, “breath” is a metaphor for
God. “Breath on me breath of God, fill me with life
anew.” In Hinduism, Prajapati, the primal spirit, is
asked how many gods there are. He tells of over 19,000 names
recorded. Then he says, “In truth, there is only one
God, BREATH.” Without breath, no other Gods exist.
The American Civil Rights leader, Martin Luther King, Jr.,
was a student at Boston University. The Dean of the University
Chapel was Howard Thurman, the grandson of slaves. Years later,
when King had been knifed in New York City, he asked to see
Thurman. When Thurman arrived at the hospital, King was reading
Thurman’s book, Jesus and the Dispossessed.
As Thurman began as Dean of the Chapel at Boston University,
since he was a Black Man, he was often mistaken for the janitor.
A rabbi tells the story of driving early each day to the university
and standing in the hall of the chapel to say his Hebrew Prayers
before classes. A man he took to be the janitor invited him
into the chapel. The Rabbi pointed to the cross and explained
he could not pray there. The next morning when the Rabbi arrived,
the cross was gone, but the rabbi still would not enter. The
“janitor” invited him in once more. As the rabbi
refused again, the “janitor” replied, “Don’t
you believe in the RUACH HAGOFEN, the Breath of the Holy?”
The rabbi discovered that the “janitor” was Howard
Thurman, the Dean of the Chapel. Each day after that, the
Rabbi prayed in the chapel.
Thurman was the living link between Mahatma Gandhi and Martin
Luther King, Jr. In the mid 1930s, Thurman and his wife toured
India on behalf of the YMCA. Gandhi invited Thurman to come
for a day. They talked for hours, Gandhi trying to understand
how Thurman could accept Christianity, given the way white
Christians often treated African Americans. Near the end of
the visit, Gandhi asked the Thurmans to sing a favorite hymn,
“Where you there when they crucified my Lord?
Where you there when they crucified my Lord?
Sometimes, it causes me to tremble, tremble, tremble,
Where you there when they crucified my Lord?”
Gandhi and Thurman shared the “RUACH HAGOFEN,”
the breath of the Holy, the universal which inspires all particular
religions. The Holy is recorded in many forms and many scriptures.
Near our Unitarian Chapel in Horsham is the Shelley Fountain.
Like Servetus, Shelley rejected the church of his time and
looked for universals in nature. The Shelley Fountain reflects
the spirit of Shelley’s poem, THE CLOUD:
“I am the daughter of earth and water,
and the nursling of the sky.
I pass though the pores of the ocean and shores,
I change, but I cannot die.”
Shelley’s poem helps me to imagine the different appearances
of the divine. Water can be a river, or it can be snow or
ice. If can be invisible in the air. Or it can be a dark cloud
as we sing, “Raindrops keep falling on my head.”
The Greek God, Zeus, dwelt in the clouds of Mt. Olympus. The
Hebrew image of God was inspired by clouds: “His chariots
of wrath the deep thunderclouds form, and dark is his path
on the wings of the storm.” Or the more gentle words:
“God is a spirit, and they that worship, worship in
spirit and in Truth.” As the Bible begins, we are told,
“God breathed into the human form, and the human form
became a living soul.”
For Servetus, though the lungs, the breath of God is breathed
into us. Our blood carries the divine spirit to every part
of our body. So Hebrew scripture forbids the eating of blood.
For blood contains the soul of the animal. The early church
transformed the seder shared by Jesus and his disciples. It
became the Catholic mass by which we share the soul of Jesus
by eating his flesh and drinking his blood:
“Let this mind be in you take was also in Christ Jesus.”
Servetus affirmed the sacrament of communion, but with the
spiritual not the physical presence of Christ. There was no
physical change in the elements brought about by transubstantiation.
The other sacrament that Servetus affirmed was baptism, but
only for adults as a sign of spiritual regeneration. His rejection
of infant baptism makes him a spiritual ancestor of Baptists
and Unitarians. It was the second heresy for which he was
burned at the stake.
His first heresy was the denial of the Trinity. At the age
of 20, Servetus had published his book, ON THE ERRORS OF THE
TRINITY. It was printed in Alsace, near what later would be
the boyhood home of another heretic named Albert Schweitzer.
Like Schweitzer, Servetus wished to get to the historical
Jesus, not the abstract Trinity of the Church. The Holy Spirit
is not a separate being, but an action of God animating all
life. As Jesus was filled with the Holy Spirit, he became
the Son of God. While God is eternal, Jesus is not eternal,
but became the Son of God in his lifetime.
The new invention of the printing press was providing texts,
which opened minds. Servetus had studied a newly printed edition
of the New Testament in Greek. And reading the original Greek,
Servetus realized that the doctrine of God as three separate
people is not in the Bible. The early Greek Church Fathers
wrote of God as having three “Masks” like an actor
in a Greek Drama. In Greek, the masks of the actors are called
“Persona.”
Translated into Latin this became three “individuals.”
For Servetus, the power of the One God animates all things.
Even the devil is of God. In today’s terms Servetus
could be seen as a kindred spirit to Matthew Fox and “CREATION
THEOLOGY.” Not that Nature is God. Rather God is in
nature, animating all things.
God has many names … Which would you lose: heart, lung
or brain ? Remember in “The wizard of OZ,” the
scarecrow, the cowardly lion, the tin man, each missing a
vital part. God is the Divine energy of the whole.
Servetus like da Vinci, was a Renaissance Man. 450 years
ago the high specialization in science and the scientific
method did not exist. It was common that the theologian, the
scientist, the alchemist and the philosopher were the same
person. He lived in the time of Galileo and Copernicus. Like
them, he was attacked by church authorities for scientific
studies that conflicted with the teaching of the church.
Like Newton, 100 years later, Servetus saw himself as interpreter
of Divine History, linking the insights of scripture to the
revelations of God in nature.
In his book, Hunted Heretic, Professor Roland Bainton of
Yale reminds us that the scientific findings of Servetus are
announced in a work of theology. For Servetus, theology, science
and art were not compartmentalized. This classic and Renaissance
approach to reality as a whole is the first key to Understanding
Servetus. In examining nature, we are exploring the riddle
of the universe. In examining scripture, we seek the original
meaning of what was written.
The second key to understanding Servetus is his rejection
of the mechanical impersonal universe of the Stoics. His belief
was close to the “élan vital,” the vital
force of French Philosopher Henri Bergson. Like Bergson’s
“Creative Evolution,” Servetus saw the universe
as filled with dynamic and creative energy. The Universe filled
with the Holy Spirit, the very essence of God. Servetus looked
for clues to the heavens like Kepler and Gallieo, and to the
human body like Vesalius and Harvey. When Emerson says, “The
task of the preacher is not to say that God spoke, but rather
that God speaketh,” Servetus could say, AMEN.
The third key to understanding Servetus is his passion to
be part of the Kingdom of God. Here is “the impossible
dream” that carries Jesus to the cross and Schweitzer
to Africa. For those possessed by “the impossible dream,”
it is not enough to comprehend God by reason, or to accept
the grace of God by faith.
For Servetus, as for George Fox and the Quakers, we are possessed
of an “inner light.” Servetus declared, “Our
soul is a certain light of God, a spark of the spirit of God,
an innate light of divinity.”
The soul is breathed into the human form by God. As the air
purifies the blood, so God inspires the soul. As Servetus
discovered the role of the lungs in renewing the blood, he
grasped the teaching of the Torah that the soul is in the
blood. It is not static in the heart or brain. It moves through
the whole person. Servetus writes, “By the breath of
God … within the heart and soul of Adam and his children,
the Spirit, the spark of the Holy, was joined with the blood
and the soul was made.”
Here is faith in the unity of all Reality. Everything is
connected. With the poet Tennyson, Servetus could have said,
“Flower in the crannied wall,
I pluck you out of crannies. …
… if I could understand what you are, root and all,
…
I should know what God and man is.”
What of these three keys to understanding Servetus?
The unity of knowledge,
God as dynamic energy
The Restoration of Christianity, not Calvin’s Institutes
of the Christian Religion.
These three keys can still inspire those of us who wish to
take up the quest and live “the impossible dream.”
To live now as though we are already living in the Commonwealth
of God. Our time is much like that of Servetus, as oil hungry
capitalists use Christian Zionists and Radical Moslems to
create a climate of fear and terror.
They encourage the “pseudo science” of creationism
and books like The Bible Code which claim to discover a code
in the Torah predicting the events of the 21st Century. Servetus
would say, “baloney.”
Another resident of Geneva, the Philosopher Voltaire, reminds
us,
“Those who believe absurdities can commit atrocities.”
We can condemn Calvin for burning Servetus. Yet, today, for
the sake of Western Civilisation, we slaughter tens of thousands,
and starve millions.
“Eternal God, have mercy upon us. Amen.”
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1. “To Dream the Impossible Dream,” song of Don
Quixote in THE MAN FROM LAMANCHA.
2. For this quote & several others, I am grateful to my
teacher, Roland Bainton, & his book HUNTED HERETIC.
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