| The
interests of Servetus to understand and, which is more
important, to try to fit this mystery in the Holy Scriptures,
made him, when he was just twenty years old, to look into
the sacred texts and the texts of the old fathers of the
Church in order to search any evidence, at least indirect,
about the mystery of the Trinity. After this conscientious
examination, Servetus realized that the Bible did not
contain any clear reference to the Trinity and reached
the conclusion that this dogma was incomprehensible and
incompatible with Christian monotheism. Most of the biographers
of Servetus point out that his doubts were founded on
the absence of any clear reference to the Trinity in the
Holy Scriptures and they arte right. However, the attitude
of Servetus was also the result of his analysis regarding
the history of history of Christianity before becoming
the official religion of the Roman empire and, in particular,
of the attempts to monopolize all religious manifestation
of the Christian cult. Let us explain what his means.
Due
to the struggle to control the urban pagan masses, who
were attached to much older and richer cults than Christians,
the first Christian communities (gentiles) began to adopt
some cultural and cosmogonic principles of the rival cults.
The fact that the first and main the Christian communities
had arisen in the Eastern provinces of the Empire, religiously
the most turbulent and cosmopolitan ones originated such
theological confusion that cause the deformation of the
primitive Christianity and the Pauline doctrine started
to shape the Christian message. The figure of Jesus, who
until end of the Ist century was considered to be a messiah
and a prophet by the jewish-christian community of Jerusalem
(headed by James, brother of Jesus), began to spread amongst
gentiles establishing a link with the pagan doctrine of
the Solar God. The identification of Jesus-Christ with
Apolus, Mitra and Adonis created a mental image between
the pagan converts radically different from the original
one.
Nevertheless,
the first Christian rulers realized that this syncretism
between the original Christian and the pagan world created
significant possibilities for those who, like Paulus,
considered necessary the evangelization of the non-Jewish
communities. To this end, the circle of Paulus, Bernabé
and later on Peter, endorsed the pagan concepts of at
least a dozen previous religions for "transforming"
the Jewish and exclusive concept of Messiah, in a kind
of copy of the typical pagan Solar God.
The
next step to facilitate the assimilation of Christianity
amongst pagan communities consisted of merging the hierarchical
relationship between Jesus and God by means of the Trinitarian
religious model. As we know, Jesus calls himself in the
Gospels the “Son of God”. It must be pointed
out that in different religions it appears the vision
of God Father, Goodness Mother and God Son (for instance
in the ancient religion of the Egyptians). This vision
of God, was not in principle something that could be considered
compatible with the Old Testament.
The
reference to the Holy Spirit which appears in some parts
of the Gospels was transformed into the feminine part
of the Trinity. Regardless of whether or not this was
consented by the first bishops, this reinterpretation
of the divine nature of Jesus and God, though it opened
the Christian doctrine to huge gentile masses, introduced
a “Trojan Horse” in the theological fortress
of Christianity capable of sinking it at any moment. As
it has been pointed out above, the shadow of the Antitrinitarians
threatened the Church since Arrius, but it did not force
the Church hierarchy to reform its interpretation of the
dogma of the Trinity, and for that reason most of the
radical reformers of the XVI century criticized this dogma,
Servetus among others.
Servetus
“Antitrinitarian” thought is basically contained
in three of his works. The first, entitled (“De
Trinitatis Erroribus, libri septem”) was printed
in Strasburg in 1531. A year later, he printed a new book
on the dogma of the Trinity (“Dialogorum de
Trinitate, libri duo). Finally, in the work which
represents the compendium of his theologic system (“The
Restoration of Christianity” or “Christianismi
Restitutio”- 1553).
In
this three books, Servetus will criticize and refute the
Nicaean interpretation of the dogma of the Trinity and
its expansion thereafter by the Scholastic doctrine. As
pointed out by Luis Betés, the doctrine of the
Trinity is formulated as follows: God is a single substance
or a single essence. The essential unity of the divine
doctrine is indistinctly shared by three persons: the
Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. The Father is not
begotten or created by anyone. The Son is begotten (nor
created) eternally by the Father, and the Holy Spirit
originates in the Son and the Father. They are different
as far as persons are concerned, but all of them partake
the divine essence, though it can not be said that they
are three goods (Luis Betés, “Anotaciones
al pensamiento teológico de Miguel Servet”,
Michael Servetus Institute, 1975, p. 5).
The bottom
line of this theological debate, which has been going
on for centuries is as important as hidden. The divinity
and/or humanity of Jesus (since doubts as to the divinity
of the Father and the Holy Spirit do not arise) revolves
around the approach taken vis-à-vis History and
the Divine Plan. If the eminent human character of the
Nazarene is accepted, the risk can be run of valuing its
historical figure like one of a prophet, that is to say,
like one of a simple man who receives a divine message
with religious content. In other words, those heresies
that implicitly maintain that Jesus was a man with a special
relation with God, not a semi-divine being, put his figure
at the same level directly or indirectly with that of
a prophet. This is extremely dangerous from the perspective
of those confessions that attribute themselves the unique
and definitive interpretation of the prophetic message.
According
to the Old Testament logic, God speaks to his herd by
means of prophets (nabi´im), in charge of revealing
the divine aims rebuking people or giving them a home
and, necessarily, taking part in the course of History.
All the prophets of the Old Testament have a mission,
either to reform the cult, to warn against vice, to prophesize
future misfortunes or fortunes or to justify the adhesion
to a political side. The existence of their people depends
on their success or failure. In addition, the religious
establishment warns against the presence of false prophets,
people who, with the same right that true prophets have,
cheer up, blame, help or manipulate the faithful. For
this reason, the trustworthiness due to preaching of the
prophet is only justifiable as an act of faith, by means
of which the believer will know how to distinguish the
good from the bad, the true from the false.
Insisting
on the humanity Jesus, allows comparing him with a prophet
and assimilating him with prophets such as Isaiah, Ezequiel
or Daniel. In this context, Jesus would spread a message
revealed by God and which must be complied with, but circumscribed
to a specific historical moment in which the divine interests
are focused, not on the Babylonian captivity or the ruin
of Judah, but on the reform of the cult (pharisaic) and
the moral reconstruction of the Hebrew community from
Palestine aside from an obsolete and corrupt “Temple”.
If these aims are fulfilled, the will of God had been
done, and if not, mankind will be punished. But this doctrine,
which defends the humanity of Jesus, is dangerous. Prophets
are men of their time and their messages are, sometimes,
confusing and incoherent. Their preaching cannot be distinguished
from that of the false prophets, or at least, not until
their prophecies happen.
God, of
course, may intervene in the world in the future through
new prophets carrying a new gospel. Therefore, if the
position of Jesus is not theologically shielded, by affirming
his eternity and divinity (as the orthodoxies do), as
being the only child of God, orthodoxies feel that we
can fall into a religious relativism of unforeseeable
consequences. Therefore, it was necessary that the message
of the Nazarene would be fully distinguished from that
of a false prophet.
If
the eternal divinity of Christ is not affirmed, as numerous
heretics have argued, there exists the possibility that
throughout the centuries a new teacher, nabi, prophet
or messiah, called Son of God, will come to update mankind
on the knowledge of the divine will, with the same authority
that Jesus had, since the confirmation of his doctrine
will be an act of personal faith. It already happened
with Mahomet, and is happening with the most illuminated
contemporary gurus.
In
contrast with the official doctrine of the Catholic Church,
also shared by Lutherans and Calvinists, Servetus proposed
a modalist interpretation of the Trinity, which he considered
was more in tune with the Holy Scriptures. He did not
accept that the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit were
different persons in the sense of different things - metaphysical
entities - though he accepted that we can refer to them
as persons in the sense of appearances, manifestation
or a “modus” of presentation. Thus, Servetus
did understand how could we say that if they are persons,
i.e. things metaphysically distinct, we could avoid triteism.
In order to save this hindrance, Servetus proposed a “modalist”
theory, which seemed enough to him to explain the diversity
of the Trinity - different modes of manifestation - and
keep the unity of the divine essence. There is a single
God and s single divinity; but divinity manifests itself
by the Word and communicates through the Spirit. “Like
the Word is the God’s essence to the text that it
manifests to the world, the Spirit is the essence of God
when he communicates to the world. The Spirit blossomed
with the Word, God expired when he talked. Spirit and
Word had the same substance, but different modus.”
(Luis Betés, “El pensamiento teológico
de Miguel Servet”, Turia 2003, p. 258-259).
As
far as Jesus Christ is concerned, Servetus agreed with
the Roman church, Lutherans and Calvinists, when he contended
that Jesus Christ is God made man, the Verb (Logos) made
flesh. Nevertheless, as opposed to the conception of the
Roman church of Jesus Christ (shared by Luther and Calvin)
as eternal son of God, Servetus argued that, since Jesus
Christ was created by God, it could not be his eternal
Son, in spite of the fact that in Jesus Christ two personalities
are met, the human and the divine one. This conception
of Jesus Christ’s nature does not diminish the warmly
faith of Servetus in Jesus Christ as the elementary and
necessary nexus between men and God, an aspect which their
prosecutors did not take into account or did not want
to weigh against of which he was being accused, most probably
for the reasons that are set forth in the following paragraph.
Except
for a handful of radical reformists, questioning the eternity
of Jesus Christ - to the extent that it could be interpreted
as an attempt to distance of Christ of the divine essence
- was considered by Catholics, Lutherans and Calvinists
(all of them confessions attached to the civil power)
a degradation of the person of Jesus Christ, which could
weaken the effectiveness of their respective messages
before their followers, hindering in such way the use
of religion as a mechanism of social control. In order
to avoid this pernicious effect, the Justinian Code, in
force in most of the civil and ecclesiastical jurisdictions
in Europe considered the negation of the dogma of the
Trinity and the negation of infants’ baptism (both
together) as a serious heretic offence, punished with
the death penalty. These were indeed the accusations that
led to Servetus to be burnt in the stake in Geneva (1553),
and previously, to be burnt in effigy by order of the
French Inquisition in Vienna (France).
Due
to his interpretation of the doctrine of the Trinity,
nowadays, some tendencies of the Unitarian Universalist
movement contend that Servetus is an unavoidable reference
to understand the origins of the Unitarian
Universalist religion, and his legacy is increasingly
being recognized by the members of this religious movement
Written
by Sergio Baches Opi and Andrés Galindo Blecua.
Translated by Sergio Baches Opi.
|
