Approval and Dissent
Catholics and Protestants alike supported the execution of Servetus. The Inquisition of Vienne, whose quarry had escaped, burned his effigy. Melanchthon, in a letter to Calvin and Bullinger, thanked "the Son of God" that "an unbeliever" had been punished and called the burning of Servetus a "godly and unforgettable lesson for all impostors." Bucer, from his pulpit in Strasbourg, said that Servetus deserved to be torn limb from limb (the book's wording, which I soften; Bucer in fact died in 1551, two years before the burning, so the book's attribution is probably an error and is flagged). Bullinger, usually a humane man, declared his agreement that the civil authorities should execute blasphemers.
Yet even in Calvin's day some men sided with Servetus. A Sicilian orator wrote a long poem, On the Unjust Death of Servetus. David Joris, an Anabaptist of Basel, published under an assumed name a tract condemning the execution; the author was identified after his death, and his body was dug up and burned in public (1566). Calvin's political enemies naturally criticized his conduct toward Servetus, and even his friends thought his severity wrong, since it encouraged French Catholics to condemn Huguenots to death for error.
Calvin's Defense of Persecution
That blame had reached its height is shown by Calvin's publication in 1554 of the Defense of the Orthodox Faith in the Holy Trinity against the Prodigious Errors of Michael Servetus. In it Calvin argued that if we take Scripture as the Creator's revelation we have reached the truth, and then anyone who opposes this truth is an unbeliever and an enemy of God; since their guilt is greater than that of criminals, the civil authorities should punish heretics more severely than murderers, because murderers destroy only men's bodies, while heresy kills the soul and condemns it to eternal torment. (This was exactly the Catholic theory of heresy.) Moreover the Creator himself has clearly taught us to kill heretics and to destroy by the sword the inhabitants of any city that refuse to worship the true faith he has revealed to us. To support his view Calvin cited the harsh laws of Deuteronomy, Exodus and Leviticus (the book gives chapter and verse), and concluded:
Those who say heretics have been unjustly punished are partners in their guilt. The question here is not man's right or authority; it is God who speaks, and the law he has left in the Church to the end of the world is explicit. If we are to put human considerations before the service of the Lord, and fail to render the honor due to the Creator, and shed no blood, and show pity where battle and holy war to glorify the Lord are unavoidable, then why does the Lord require such severity of us? (I abridge the passage.)
Calvin tempers the conclusion he drew from the Old Testament by showing pity for those whose heresy is not fundamental or springs from ignorance and weakness of mind. How could Calvin, who had made Paul his guide, ignore Paul's belief that the new law has abrogated the old? Perhaps he saw that if differences of faith and opinion entered Geneva, the divine order he had founded there would fall apart.
The Tradition of Erasmus
What then became of the tradition of tolerance Erasmus had left? Erasmus favored tolerance because he did not think his own beliefs certain and infallible. Luther and Melanchthon, once sure of the truth and soundness of their beliefs, forgot tolerance. Calvin, from the age of twenty, had been sure of his. But there were still humanists, familiar with the classics and turned from Catholicism by the lack of freedom of thought in Rome's domain, who in various corners of Europe reminded their contemporaries that certainty in religion and philosophy is unattainable, and that theologians and philosophers therefore ought not to stain their hands with men's blood in defense of any particular belief. One of these humanists, who now spoke of freedom of thought, had once been a close friend of Calvin.
Sebastian Castellio
Sebastian Castellio was born in 1515 in the Jura region of France and became skilled in Latin, Greek and Hebrew. He taught Greek in Lyons, lived with Calvin in Strasbourg, and was placed by Calvin at the head of Geneva's Latin school (1541), where he began a translation of the whole Bible into Ciceronian Latin. Though he admired Calvin, he disliked his doctrine of predestination and suffered under the order Calvin had imposed on Geneva. In 1544 he accused the city's pastors of intolerance, impurity and drunkenness. Calvin complained of him to the council, and Castellio was banished for slander (1544). Responsible for a large family, he lived for nine years in crushing poverty, and in that time, working at night and going without sleep, finished his Latin translation of the Bible (1551), after which he began translating it into French. At last, in 1553, he was named professor of Greek literature at the University of Basel.
Castellio sympathized with the supporters of Unitarianism and had wanted to help Servetus, but Calvin's support for Servetus's execution deeply angered him. In March 1554, Castellio and Caelius Curio, under assumed names, published the first modern classic in defense of religious tolerance, Should Heretics Be Persecuted? The main part of the work is a compilation by Curio of what Christians had said on religious tolerance, from Lactantius and Jerome to Erasmus, the early days of Luther's revolt, and even Calvin.
In the preface and afterword Castellio argued that for hundreds of years people had debated free will, predestination, heaven and hell, Christ and the Trinity and other knotty questions, that the debates had produced no result and perhaps never would. He thought continuing them pointless, since they do not improve men's character or conduct, and what we need is to put Christ's teaching into daily life: feed the hungry, nurse the sick and befriend even our enemies. He called ridiculous the effort of the new and old churches to impose their views as absolute truth on people within their reach, and said that if it went on, a man regarded as a follower of the true faith in one city would be thought a heretic and unbeliever in the next, and on crossing the border between states would have to change his religion as he changes his money. Is it believable that Christ would permit his followers to burn alive a man who opposes infant baptism? The law of Moses, which condemned the unbelieving to death, was abrogated and set aside in the light of Christ's law, which proclaims compassion, goodwill and humanity and opposes tyranny and coercion. Castellio held that if someone denies life after death or tramples all law and custom, magistrates have the right to silence him, but no right to destroy him. Besides, persecuting people for faith and opinion is futile, because a man's martyrdom for his belief draws more people to it. He ended: how painful and sad to see those who have only just freed themselves from the dread claws of the Inquisition so soon take up its tyrannical methods and, after the dawn of such hopeful light, return people to fearful darkness! Calvin, who knew Castellio's feelings, saw on reading the tract on the new ideas' followers that it came from his pen, and ordered his ablest pupil, Theodore Beza, to answer it.
Beza's Answer
Theodore Beza was born at Vézelay in an aristocratic family, studied law at Orléans and Bourges, practiced as a lawyer in Paris, wrote Latin verse, enjoyed a pleasant life of wealth and standing and married, and in the end fell gravely ill. After recovering he turned to Protestantism, fled to Geneva, drew close to Calvin and taught Greek at the University of Lausanne. It is surprising that a man whom the persecution of French Huguenots had driven to Geneva should himself support force against believers of other opinions. With his skill in law he undertook the mission Calvin gave him and in September 1553 (the date in the book, probably an error for 1554) published a tract on the duty of civil rulers to punish heretics. He again pointed out that religious tolerance is impossible for those who take Scripture to be the Creator's revelation. If we do not take Scripture as God's word, on what basis shall we found religious faith, which, given man's unruly nature, is necessary to reform morals, preserve social order and maintain civilization? Without such a basis, intellectual chaos would destroy Christianity. For those who sincerely believe in Scripture there is only one religion, and the others are baseless and imperfect. The Gospel is indeed the law of love, but that law does not stop us from punishing thieves and murderers. How then could it allow us to overlook heretics?
The Later Castellio
Castellio replied to Beza's argument in a tract, Against Calvin's Falsehoods, but it was not published for half a century. In another work, On Doubt, before Descartes, he made doubt the first step toward the discovery of truth. In his four dialogues (1578) he raised the question of free will and the possibility of salvation for all the world. In 1562, in a tract, Counsel to a Desolate France, he asked, without success, that France's Catholics and Protestants stop their ruinous civil war and let all Christian believers "worship God according to their own faith, not according to the beliefs of others." Castellio died at forty-eight, in poverty and want (1563), and Calvin called his early death the just judgment of a righteous God.