Benadam74′s Blog

Michael Servetus by William Osler. 4

PART 4

Next to theology itself the study of medicine has been a great heresy breeder. From the days of Arnold of Villanova and Pierre of Abano, there have been noted heretics in our ranks. Bossuet defines a heretic as `One who has opinions’. Servetus seems to have been charged with. Opinions like a Leyden jar. His most notable ones concerned the Trinity and Infant Baptism. Wracked almost to destruction in the third and fourth centuries on the subject of the Trinity, the final conquest of Arianism found its expression in that magnificent human document the Athanasian Creed, with which the Catholic Church has forever settled th–question, in language which sends a cold shudder down the backs of heretics. But there have always been turbulent souls who could not rest satisfied, and who would bring up unpleasant points from the Bible-men who were not able to accept Dante’s wise advice. Mad is he who hopes that our reason can traverse the infinite way which one Substance as Three Persons holds. Be content oh human race with the Quia’. The doctrine has been a great breeding ground of heretics, the smoke of whose burning has been a sweet savour in the nostrils alike of Catholics and Protestants. Even to-day, so deeply ingrained is the catholic creed, that nearly everything in the way of doctrinal vagary is forgiven save denial of the Trinity, which is thought to put a man outside the pale of normal Christianity. If this is the feeling to-day, imagine what it must have been in the middle of the sixteenth century ! Servetus wrote two theological works-de Trinitatis Erroribus, published in 1531, followed by a supplement in 1532. To these I have already referred. Living a double life at Vienne, to the inhabitants he was the careful and kind practitioner of medicine, to whom they had become devoted, but all the while, nourishing the dream of his youth, he had in preparation a work which he believed would win the world to Christ by purifying the Church from grave errors in doctrine. I have already spoken of the printing of the Christianismi Restitutio. Mainly concerned with most abstruse questions concerning the Trinity and Infant Baptism, it is a most difficult work to read, and, as theologians confess, a still more difficult one to understand. Professor Emerton, in his article from which I have already quoted, gives in a few paragraphs the essence of his views. ‘He finds the central fact of Christian speculation, not in the doctrine of the Trinity as formulated by the schools, but in the fact of the divine incarnation in the person of Jesus. He admits the divine birth, explaining it as in harmony with a general law of divine manifestation whereby the spiritual is revealed in the material. He would not accept the idea of an eternal sonship, except in this sense, that the divine Word, the Logos, had always been active as the expression in outward form of the divine activity. So, in the fullness of time, this same Logos produced a being from a human mother upon whom at the momentof his birth the divine Spirit was breathed. Obviously this is not the “eternal Son” of the creeds, and herein lay the special theological crime of Servetus. In his criticism of the church order, of the papal government, of the sacramental system, he does not differ essentially from the more radical of the reformers. On the essential matters of baptism and the Eucharist he goes quite beyond the established reforming churches. In both cases he invokes the principle of plain reason. He rejects Infant Baptism on the ground that the infant can have no faith, and that the practice is therefore mere incantation. He denies transubstantiation on the rational basis that substances and accidents may not be separated, and does not spare the reforming leaders for what seemed to him their half-hearted attitude on this point. His language throughout is harsh and violent, except where, as at the close of his chapters, he passes over into the forms of devotion and closes his diatribes with prayers of great beauty and spirituality.’

The Christian Church early found out that there was only one safe way of dealing with heresy. From the end of the fourth century, when the habit began, to its climax on St. Bartholomew’s Day, it was universally recognized that only dead heretics ceased to be troublesome. History affords ample evidence of the efficacy of repressive measures, often carried out on a scale of noble proportions. France is Catholic because of a root and branch policy; England’s Protestantism is an enduring testimony to the thoroughness with which Henry VIII carried out his measures. As De Foe says in his famous pamphlet, Shortest way with Dissenters, if a man is obstinate and persists in having an opinion of his own, contrary to that held by a majority of his fellows, and if the opinion is pernicious and jeopardizes his eternal salvation, it is much safer to burn him than to allow his doctrines to spread! For 1,200 years this policy kept heresy within narrow limits until the great outbreak. The very best men of the day were consenting to the death of heretics. The spirit of Protestantism was against it; Luther nobly so. Judged by his age Servetus was a rank heretic, and as deserving of death as any ever tied to a stake. We can scarcely call him a martyr of the Church.-What Church would own him? All the same, we honour his memory as a martyr to the truth as he saw it.

Servetus was a student of medicine in Paris with Sylvius and Guinther, two of the most ardent of the revivers of the Galenic anatomy. More important still, he was a fellow student and pro-sector with Vesalius. He wrote one little medical book of no special merit. The works which he edited, which brought him more money than fame, indicate an independent and critical spirit. Vienne was a small town, in which we cannot think there was any scientific stimulus, though it was in a region noted for its intellectual activity. In possession of a fact in physiology of the very first moment, Servetus described it with extraordinary clearness and accuracy. But so little did he think of the discovery, of so trifling importance did it appear in comparison with the great task in hand of restoring Christianity, that he used it simply as an illustration when discussing the nature of the Holy Spirit in his work Christianismi Restitutio. The discovery was nothing less than that of the passage of the blood from the right side of the heart to the left through the lungs, what is known as pulmonary or lesser circulation. In the year 1553 the views of Galen everywhere prevailed. The great master had indeed affected a revolution in the knowledge of the circulation almost as great as that made by Harvey in the seventeenth century. Briefly stated there were two bloods, the natural and the vital, in two practically closed systems, the veins and the arteries. The liver was the central organ of the venous system, the `shop’ as Burton calls it, in which the chylus was converted into blood and from which it was distributed by the veins to all parts of the body for nourishment. The veins were rather vessels containing the blood than tubes for its transmission-irrigating canals Galen called them. Galen knew the structure of the heart, the arrangement of its valves, and the direction in which the blood passed, but its chief function was not, as we suppose, mechanical, but in the left ventricle, the seat of life, the vital spirits were generated, being a mixture of inspired air and blood. By an alternate movement of dilatation and collapse of the arteries the blood with the vital spirits were kept in constant motion.’ Galen had demonstrated that the arteries and the veins communicated with each other at the periphery. A small quantity of the blood went, he believed, from the right side of the heart to the lungs, for their nourishment, and in this way passed to the left side of the heart; but the chief communication between the two systems was through pores in the ventricular septum, the thick muscular wall separating the two chief chambers of the heart.

The literature may be searched in vain for any other than the Galenic view up to 1553.Even Vesalius, who could not understand from its structure how even the smallest quantity of blood could pass through the septum dividing the ventricles, offered no other explanation. The more one knows of the Galenic physiology, the less one is surprised that it had so captivated the minds of men. The description of the new way which Servetus describes is found in the fifth book of the Christianismi Restitutio, in which he is discussing the nature of the Holy Spirit. After mentioning the threefold spirit of the body of man, natural, vital, and animal, he goes on to discuss the vital spirit, and in so firmly entrenched was the Galenic physiology that the new views of Harvey made at first very slow progress. In Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, which is a sort of epitome of medical knowledge of the seventeenth century, is the following description : `The left creek (i.e. ventricle) has the form of a cone, and is the seat of life, which, as a torch doth oil, draws blood unto it begetting of it spirits and fire, and as a fire in a torch so are spirits in the blood ; and by that great artery called aorta, it sends vital spirits over the body, and takes air from the lungs.’ elaboration or transformation in the lungs, so that with the freeing the blood of `fuliginous vapours’, there was at the same time a change to the crimson colour of the arterial blood ; fourthly, the direct denial of a communication of the two bloods, by means of orifices in the septum between the ventricles.

He had no idea of the general or systematic circulation, and so far as the left heart and the arteries were concerned he believed them to be the seat of the vital blood and spirits. It is not hard to imagine how Servetus had become emancipated from the old views. A student at Paris at a most opportune period, when dissection had become popular, he had had as pro-sector to Guinther exceptional opportunities. But more important still, he had as fellow worker the anatomical arch-heretic, Andreas Vesalius, already imbued with the conviction that his teachers were wrong in regarding Galen as inspired and infallible. It was at this very period that Vesalius had pointed out to his teacher Sylvius the error of Galen about the aortic valves ; and when one considers the extraordinary rapidity with which Vesalius reformed human anatomy, before he had completed his twenty-eighth year, it is not surprising that his colleague and co-worker should have discovered one of the great truths of physiology. The Christianismi Restitutio was never published, and the discovery of Servetus remained unrecognized until the attention of Wotton was called to it by Charles Bernard, a St. Bartholomew’s Hospital surgeon.’ Mean-while it had been rediscovered, and among the many vagaries with which the history of the circulation of the blood is marked, not the least striking is the attempt to rob Servetus of his credit. In 1 559 there was published a work by Realdus Colombo,’ a student of Vesalius and his successor at Padua, in which the circulation of the blood from the right side of the heart to the left is clearly described. It is impossible to say that he had added anything to the account just given, and the far-fetched view has been maintained that Italian students at Paris had acquainted Servetus with the views of Colombo. It is claimed for Colombo also that he had a better idea of the function of respiration in the purification of the blood, by its mingling with the air, but Servetus distinctly states that the mixture takes place in the lungs, not, as was usually understood at the time, in the heart itself. Caesalpinus (1569), for whom elaborate claims are made, also knew of the pulmonary circulation, but he thought part of the blood went through the median septum. A more important claim is made for him of the discovery of the general circulation, but it is remarkable that anyone knowing the history of the subject could read into his physiology anything more than the old Galenic views.

The history of the circulation bristles with controversy and widely divergent opinions are held as to the merits of the different observers. That Servetus first advanced a step beyond Galen, that Colombo and Caesalpinus reached the same conclusion independently-all three recognizing the lesser circulation, is quite as certain as that it remained for Harvey to open an entirely new chapter in physiology, and to introduce modern experi-mental methods by which the complete circulation of the blood was first clearly demonstrated.’ A word about the book Christianismi Restitutio, liber inter rariores longe rarissimus. Only two complete copies are known, one in the Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris, and the other in the Imperial Library, Vienna, from which I was very kindly permitted to have the photographs of the title-page and the pages describing the circulation of the blood which are here reproduced. A third copy, imperfect, with the first sixteen pages in MS., is in the University Library, Edinburgh. The Paris copy is of special interest, as it belonged to Dr. Richard Mead, the distinguished physician and book collector, by whom it was exchanged with M. de Boze for a series of medals. In 1784 it was secured for the Royal Library. It may now be seen in one of the show cases of the Bibliotheque Nationale, of which it is one of the rare treasures. An added interest is in the fact that on the title-page occurs the name ‘Germain Colladon’, the Geneva barrister, who prosecuted Servetus; and it is in the highest degree probable that this was the identical copy used at the trial. In one place the book is stained, some suppose by moisture; others think it possible this was the very copy bound upon the victim himself, and snatched from the flames by some one who wished to preserve so interesting a record of the great heretic. The question has been examined carefully by the late Professor Laboubene and M. Hahn, the distinguished librarian of the Paris Faculty of Medicine, both of whom are in favour of fire, not moisture, as the cause of the staining.

In 1791 the Vienna copy was reprinted at Nuremberg in facsimile, page for page, but Dr. de Murr, who was responsible for the reprint, very wisely put the date 1791 at the bottom of the last page. Copies of this edition are not uncommon in the larger libraries. In 1723 Mead attempted to have a reprint made from his copy, but when nearlycompleted the Bishop of London had it suppressed, and (it is stated) the copies were burnt. A few, however, escaped, and Willis says that he saw one in the library of the London Medical Society. I regret to say that the librarian informs me that this no longer is to be found. A copy of the Mead partial reprint is in the Bibliotheque Nationale, and two copies are in the British Museum.

A last word on the attitude of John Calvin towards Servetus. Much scorn has been heaped upon the great reformer, and one cannot but regret that a man of such magnificent achievements should have been dragged into a miserable heresy hunt like a common inquisitor. Let us not estimate him by his century, as his friends plead, but frankly by his life, and as a man of like passions with ourselves. He had bitter provocation. Flouted for years by the persistent assaults of Servetus, and shocked out of all compassion by his. Blasphemies, is it to be wondered that the old Adam got the better of his Christian charity? Not only is it impossible to acquit Calvin of active complicity in this unhappy affair, but there was mixed up with it a personal hate, vindictiveness unbecoming in so great a character and we may say foreign to it. But let the long record of a self-denying life, devoted in an evil generation to the highest and the best, wipe for all reasonable men this one blot. Let us, if we may judge him at all, do so as a man, not as a demi-god. We cannot defend him, let us not condemn him ; let his one grievous fault, even though we may fear he never repented of it, be the shadow which throws into stronger relief the splendid outlines of a noble life. In his defense,’ the original edition of which I have here, and which is concerned largely with doctrinal questions, not only are there no expressions of regret for the part he played in the tragedy, but the work is filled with insults to his dead enemy, couched in the most vindictive language. On the spot where Servetus was burnt there stands to-day an expiatory monument (Fig. ii), which expresses the spirit of modern Protestantism. On one side is the record of his birth and death, on the other an inscription, of which the following is a translation: ‘Duteous and grateful followers of Calvin our great Reformer, yet condemning an error which was that of his age, and strongly attached to liberty of conscience according to the true principles of the Reformation and the Gospel, we have erected this expiatory monument. Oct. 27, 1903.’

The erection next year at Vienne of quarter-centenary monument will complete the recognition by the modern world of the merits of one of the strangest figures on the rich canvas of the sixteenth century. The wandering Spanish scholar, the stormy disputant, the anatomical pro-sector, the mystic dreamer of a restored Christianity, the discoverer of one of the fundamental facts of physiology, has come at last to his own. There are those, I know, who feel that perhaps more than justice has been done; but in a tragic age Servetus played an unusually tragic part, and the pathos of his fate appeals strongly to us.

These, too, are days of retribution, of the restoration of all things, the days of the opening of the fifth seal, when the souls under the altar see their blood avenged, when we clothe in the white robes of charity those who were slain for the testimony which they held, little noting whether the martyr was Catholic or Protestant, caring only to honour one of that great company which no man can number, ‘ whose heroic sufferings,’ as Carlyle says, `rise up melodiously together to heaven out of all lands and out of all time, as a sacred Miserere, their heroic actions also as a boundless everlasting Psalm of Triumph.’

Note.-The Servetus bibliography is fully given to 18 go in Professor A. V.D. Linde’s Michael Servetus, Groningen, 1891. My personal interest dates many years back when Pastor Tollin’s delightful sketches enlivened the numbers of Virchow’s Archives. No one has ever had a more enthusiastic biographer, and to the writings of the Madgeburg clergyman we owe the greater part of our modern knowledge of Servetus. The best account in Errglish is by Willis-Servetus and Calvin, 1877. A German translation of the Christianismi Restilulio by Dr. Bernhard Spiess appeared in 1895 (2nd edition, Wiesbaden, Chr. Limbarth). I am indebted to Professor Harper of Princeton for an historical drama, The Reformer of Geneva, by Professor Shields (privately printed, Princeton University Press, 1897), which gives an admirable picture of Geneva at the time of the trial. From Chereau’s Histoire dun Livre, 1879, I have `cribbed’ the idea of the introduction. The name of Mosheim must be mentioned, as his writings were for years the common tap from which all Servetus knowledge was derived. The Servetus portrait, of which Mosheim speaks, has disappeared; I have reproduced the engraving from Allworden’s Historia (1727), also the Roch statue at Anamnese.

LONDON

HENRY FROWDE

OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

AMEN CORNER, E.C.

1909