CHRISTIANISMI RESTITUTIO by Michael Servetus
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標題: CHRISTIANISMI RESTITUTIO by Michael Servetus
時間: Mon May 19 02:48:56 2008
http://www.miguelservet.org/servetus/works.htm#christianismi
HISTORICAL CONTEXT
After his trial in Paris, Servetus abandoned Paris and moved first to Lyon
and after to Charlieu, where he practiced quietly his medical profession
during two or three years. Around 1540, Servetus translated its residence to
Vienne (France), a little and quiet town close to Lyon. The main reason to
move to Vienne was that in said city lived Pierre Palmier, who in Paris had
attended Servetus’ lessons on geography. El Prof. Bainton points out that
one of the reasons why Servetus moved to Vienne lies in the fact that the
Treshsel brothers, belonging to a family of very well-known printers, had
established a printer in Vienne. These twelve years were the most pacific
years of his life. Servetus dedicated his time to practice medicine and to
work on the second edition of the “Ptolomei Geography” in 1541 and a new
edition of the Bible of Santes Pagnini.
During more than twelve years his presence in Vienne remained unnoticed by
the religious authorities, and he even obtained the recognition of the Vienne
society for his medical arts. He had among his clients Guy de Maugiron,
adjunt governor of Vienne.
In this quiet environment, Servetus undertook secretly the drafting of his
most important work: the “Cristianismi Restitutio” (“The Restoration of
Christianity”). From 1546 onwards, a manuscript was already circulating,
although it is unknown how many copies could have been distributed in such
way. In 1551, Arnoullet and Gueroult established a clandestine printer close
to Vienne. It is in this city in which the “Christianismi Restitutio” would
start to be published. The printing took place between the day of Saint
Michael and January 1553. Around 800 copies were printed (but not bound) and
distributed in bails simulating paper in order to avoid suspicions. On
January 3, 1553, the first bail of 500 books hidden in hay bales was sent to
the Frankfurt book fair. The second shipment was sent to the shop of Pierre
Merrin in Lyon, and the third was sent to a bookshop in Geneva. Despite all
the precautions, practically all the bails were destroyed as soon as they
were put into the market.
CONTENTS
This treatise is the most well-known work of Michael Servetus and in which he
condensed his philosophic and theological thought. The book is divided into
six parts.
The first part contains five books regarding the divine Trinity in which
Sevetus develops his original arguments against the Nicean interpretation of
the dogma of the Trinity contained in one of his first works: “De Trinitatis
Erroribus (1531)”. The second part is composed of three books, which are
presented as a dialogue, on the “Faith and Righteous of Christ”, and the “
Kingdom of Christ and Love”. This part contains a more detailed exposition
of the arguments he developed in the “Dialogorum de Trinitate” (1532). The
third part comprises three books regarding the Faith and Justice of the
Kingdom of Christ, the differences between the Law and the Gospels, and the
comparison between Charity and Faith. These three books are a reformulation
of his statements in “Dialogorum de Trinitate: De iusticia regni Christi, ad
iusticiam legis collata et de charitate”. The fourth part contains thirty
letters of Servetus to Calvin. In the fifth part, Servetus enumerates sixty
signs of the Kingdom of Antichrist. The sixth part contains an “Apology of
the Mistery of the Trinity against Philip Melanchton and his colleagues”
containing a self-defense of Servetus against the attacks from Melanchton in
his “Loci Communes” to Servetus’s works.
The “Restoration of Christianity” is not an easy work to read due to its
metaphors and twisted reasonings. However, this should not be an excuse to
prevent us from providing a summary of its contents:
a) The emanantism of Servetus
According to Prof. Bainton, Servetus contends that “God is the Summun One, a
dynamic source committed to perpetual development through intermediaries such
reason, wisdom and the word, compared in their manifestation to the sun
light. This emanations descend from the One, and in that way reality is
graduated in different levels depending on its destiny from the source”. (R.
H. Bainton, “El hereje perseguido”, Ed. Taurus, 1973, p. 138).
In the “Christianismi Restitutio”, Servetus wrote:
“Since it contains itself the essences of all the things, he appears in
front of us like fire, stone and electricity, a rod, a flower, or any other
thing. He does not perturb because a stone is seen in God. Is it a true
stone? Clearly yes: God is wood in the wood, stone in the stone, since he has
in himself the being of the stone, the form of the stone, the substance of
the stone.” (“Christianismi Restitutio”, p. 589)
God confers the being, essence, particularitity to everything what exists,
and sustains to all the beings. Nothing can be without Him. God fills
everything, even the Hell itself.” (“Christianismi Restitutio”, p. 240).
In spite of this language closed to panteism, Servetus was not, as it has
been pointed out by some authors, a panteist (doctrine that confuses God with
the being of all the things), but rather “panenteists”. For Servetus all
the present things in the world, either tangible or intangible, emanate and
are created from “nothing” by God through his Word, that is to say, by
means of the Divine Verb, and the emanations of God participate in different
degrees from the divine essence; nevertheless, for Servetus, all those things
are not God, as it could defend a panteists:
“There is a single divine way, the most outstanding and principal of all the
others. So it is that of the complete substance, the divine way without
substance, that is only in the body and the spirit of Jesus. [...] A way is
the manifestation in the Word, the other is the communication in the Spirit;
one corporal, another spiritual. Both are substantial ways that give life to
other things, as much in the body as in the spirit... All the other things
derive from them, just as the branches derived from the same trunk, just as
the sprouts of the same root, like the grapes of the same vine.
b) About the Trinity
Serveto summarizes in this work his conceptions on the dogma of the Trinity
which he studied in detail in his first works. Servetus was not, as it has
been pointed out some times, an antitrinitarian. What Servetus fought against
was the formulation of this mystery by the Council of Niceae (325). For this
reason, it can be concluded that Servetus believed in the Trinity, but
relying on reason he interpreted it in a different way from that of the Roman
church. His conception of God, which was influenced by the neoplatonic
philosophy, conditioned Servetus’ approach to the mystery of the Trinity.
After studying the Bible with thoroughness, Servetus realized that no express
reference to the word “Trinity” could be found within it. He reached the
conclusion that this dogma had perverted the understanding of the true
relation between God and Jesus Christ, and between God and mankind. In this
way, Servetus’ thought was linked with the thought of those which previously
questioned the validity of the dogma of the Trinity.
Unlike the traditional defenders of the dogma of the Trinity, Servetus
contended that there was not a real distinction between the three persons of
the Trinity. These were not “persons” but “modes” under which divinity
manifests itself. For Servetus, Jesus Christ was God when he became man and,
for that reason, lacked that divine quality previously. Servetus admitted
that Christ was the son of God, but only after his appearance in the earth.
The Verb is the form and has preexisted along with the Father. But the flesh
is substance. Jesus Christ is the combination of both and, therefore, he
could have not preexisted to that union.
Christ was a real and historical man, but he was more than a simple man
because he was the natural Son of God, and this differentiated him from the
rest of men, who were adoptive sons of God. As far as the Holy Spirit is
concerned, for Servetus it was not a person/hypostase aside from God, because
that reasoning led to the tritheism. With these statements, Servetus
dissented of catholics and protestants (who affirmed the consustantiality of
Christ with God, and therefore his eternal character), but also of those
sects escinded from Protestantism that openly denied the divine character of
Jesus Christ.
c) His Christocentric mysticism
Servetus’ rejection to endorse the interpretation of the dogma of the
Trinity by the Roman church did not mean that Christ did not play an
essential role in the theological system of Servetus. According to Servetus,
Jesus Christ is the indispensable intermediary that allows mankind to know,
to approach, and even to rise up to God. Unlike Calvinism and, to a certain
extent also Catholicism, which contended that human nature was intrinsically
depraved and corrupt, Servetus argued that the union of man with God through
Jesus Christ was possible: “the Divine has lowered until the human so that
the human can ascend to the Divine” (“Christianismi Restitutio”, p. 279).
For Prof. Hillar, Servetus’ insistence on our closenesss to God, even after
the original sin, is the most outstanding characteristic of Servetus’
humanism and differentiates him from other humanists and theologians (M.
Hillar, “Michael Servetus, Intellectual Giant, Humanist and Martyr”,
University Press of America, 2002, p. 102).
According to Servetus:
“In the Bible there are no mentions to the Trinity, neither hypostases, nor
essence, nor persons, which were made up by the Scholastics for the sake of
confussion [... ]. We know God not through our proud philosophical
conceptions, but through Christ who manifest himself in Him, and only through
the faith in him can we know God. Christ is a visible being and not a mere
hypostasis. God does not take corporal form but in Christ. Our inner man is
but Christ itself. This does not mean that we are just like Christ, because
nobody is just like another person. But Christ communicates his glory to us:
“The glory that you you gave me, I have given it to them, so that I am in
them like you [Father] are in me” [John 17 ]. Christ is called our inner
man, because he communicates his spirit to us and renews us every day. The
more Christ renews our spirit by the fire of his spirit, the more it
penetrates in our body, the more grows in Christ our inner man: while He
materializes in us, the outer man declines.
Our inner man consists of the divine element of Christ, and the human element
of our nature, in such a way that we are properly called participants of the
divine nature and it is said that our life is hidden in Christ. Oh
incomparable glory! will not be in us the Kingdom of God, if Christ who is in
Heaven is in us, doing to us what He is? Our inner man is really celestial.
He has come from Heaven, from God’s substance, from the the flesh’s will,
from God itself. Our inner man is God, as Christ is God.
Our inner man is God, as Christ is God and the Holy Spirit is God. As
anticipating this truth Salmist said: “I said it, you are Gods”. And as one
God makes many gods, therefore only one Christ makes many gods.” (“
Christianismi Restitutio”, pp. 557-59).
d) Servetus’ anabaptism
Servetus only accepted two sacraments, the baptism, but only when people
reached the age of reason, and the Lord’s Supper. Therefore, he shared with
the anabaptists the rejection to baptism of the infants. The anabaptist
movement comprised several groups of radical reformers which were in favour
of administering baptism only to adults. The anabaptist movement acquired an
eminent political meaning under the direction of Thomas Münzer (1490-1525),
who was first Luther’s collaborator and soon became his adversary, and
Nicholas Stroch.
The anabaptists characterized themselves by their moral rigor, the simplicity
of their cult and their longing for social justice. For all these reasons,
they were persecuted by all the reformed churches. In fact, his main leader,
Thomas Münzer was arrested and beheaded. Once their main leaders had been
executed, anabaptists reorganized themselves under the direction of John of
Leiden and conquered the city of Münster, where they were thrown out and
exterminated in 1535.
Servetus’ anabaptism had nothing to do with the political and social program
of the anabaptitsts and stayed within the boundaries of the religious field.
Therefore, Servetus never embraced nor supported the social-political
postulates of revolt against the feudal power advocated by some anabaptists
leaders and which in Germany led to the 1524 farmers’revolts.
Servetus based his rejection to infans’ baptism on the importance that
baptism has for Christians as being an act of redemption in Christ (“
Christianismi Restitutio”, pp. 724-725). This deep act of regeneration to a
new spiritual life only has sense when people reach an age in which they can
distinguish between good and evil, and, consequently, they cannot be numbed
by the devil (“Cristianismi Restitutio”, pp. 574-578). For Servetus, this
usually happens when people are approximately twenty years old. Before this
age, baptism does not need to be administered (“Cristianismi Restitutio”,
p. 568). In this sense, Servetus advised the postponement of baptism to the
age of thirty years, following the example Christ (“Christianismi Restitutio
”, p. 577).
f) The blood circulation
Book V of the “Christinianismi Restitutio” (pages 168 to 173) contains the
famous paragraph of the pulmonary circulation system. Those who still wonder
why this scientific discovery is contained in a book of theology must look
for the answer in the integrating character of Servetus’ system of thought.
As a son of the Renaissance, Servetus did not approach theology, medicine,
philosophy and the resmainder of sciences as separate compartments, but as
interrelated disciplines that allowed mankind to understand the universe
globally.
Servetus discovered the blood circulation because the knowledge of the
sensible world allowed him to understand the relationship between God and
mankind. For Servetus, mankind could aspire to communicate with God following
the example of Jesus. For that communication to take place, there must be a “
spark” of divinity which is infused in the man and which Servetus identified
with the “pneuma”. At this time, the “pneuma” (i.e. what is breathed) was
synonymous of soul. The soul, according to the Biblical tradition (Genesis
2:7), was infused by God to man through respiration. Servetus thought that,
if the soul was in the blood, the best form to understand the soul was to
study the circulation of the blood in the human body. For that reason,
Servetus was more interested in the the circulation of the soul than in the
circulation of the blood as such. Servetus discovered that, contrary to Galen
’s conception of the circulation, the transmission of the blood from the
right ventricle of the heart to the left ventricle did not take place through
the pores of the middle partition of the heart, but through a “grand device”
whereby blood is driven from the right ventricle of the hearth towards the
lungs for its oxigenation, and sent to the to the left ventricle of the heart
through the pulmonary vein.
...
EXCERPTS
Natural, vital and animal spirits. Location
“Therefore, so that you can acquire complete knowledge of the soul and the
spirit, I am going to include here, reader (Christian), a divine philosophy
which you will easily understand, if you are acquainted with anatomy. Usually
it is said that there are within us three spirits from the substance of the
three higher elements: natural, vital and animal. The vital spirit is that
which is communicated to the veins through anastomoses with the arteries, and
once in the veins it receives the name of natural spirit. The first, then, is
the blood with its seat in the liver and the veins of the body; the second is
the vital spirit, with the seat in the heart and the arteries of the body;
the animal spirit is the third, which is like a ray of light, with its seat
in the brain and the nerves of the body. In these three there is the energy
of the only Spirit and Light of God.” (p. 169).
The soul is in the blood
“That the natural spirit is communicated by the heart to the liver is
demostrated by the formation of the man from the uterus, since through the
umbilical cord the artery together with the vein runs, and also in us later
on, artery and vein go always united. The soul was infused by God to Adam
before to the heart than to the liver, being communicated to him from the
heart. The soul was infused to him by inspiration in his face and nostrils;
but that inspiration goes to the heart. The heart is the first thing that
lives, the heat source in the center of the body. It takes from the liver the
liquid of the life, as its substance, and it vivifies it as well; in the same
way that the liquid of the water provides the substance to the higher
elements and, when receiving the light, is vivified by them to germinate. The
substance of the soul is made of blood from the liver, by means of a
wonderful elaboration that will be explained here. For that reason it is said
that the soul is in the blood, and that the same soul is the blood or is the
blood spirit. It is not said that the soul is mainly in the partition of the
heart, nor in the mass of the brain or the liver, but in the blood, as God
itself teaches (Gene 9; Lev. 17; Deut. 12).” (pp. 169-170).
Pulmonary circulation
“To understand all this it is necessary to understand first how the
substantial generation of the vital spirit takes place, which is constituted
and fed by the inhaled air and by a very subtle blood. The vital spirit has
its origin in the left ventricle of the heart, and the lungs contribute
mostly to its production. It is produced in the lungs when the air inhaled is
combined with the elaborated subtle blood that the right ventricle of the
heart transmits to the left. But this communication does not take place
through the middle wall of the heart as it is usually believed, but rather,
by means of a great contrivance, the subtle blood is pumped forward from the
right ventricle of the heart to a large circuit through the lungs. In the
lungs [blood] is elaborated and becomes red, and it is transfused from the
pulmonary artery (arterial vein) to the pulmonary vein (venous artery).
Later, in the same pulmonary vein it mingles with the air inspired and
through expiration it is purified again of the dark vapors... and finally,
the total mixture, apt subtance to become vital spirit, is attracted by
diastole from the left ventricle of the heart.” (p. 170).
Arguments in favor of the pulmonary circulation
“However, the fact that such communication and elaboration is made [this
way] through the lungs, is demonstrated by the varied connection and
communication of the pulmonary artery with the pulmonary vein in the lungs,
and it is confirmed by the notable large size of the pulmonary artery, since
it would have not been made so big, and neither would send such amount of
purest blood from the heart to the lungs, simply to feed them, nor by this
reason could be useful the heart to the lungs. Mainly, if it is taken into
account that, previously, in the embryo, the lungs were nourished from
another source, because those little membranes or valves of the heart are not
opened until the moment of the birth, as Galen teaches. It is, then, evident
that when the blood is spilled so abundantly of the heart to the lungs at the
moment of birth it has another fuction. The same is proven by the fact that
the lungs do not send to the heart, through the pulmonary vein, only air, but
air mixed with blood. Then such mixture takes place in the lungs: the lungs
give to the oxygenated blood that reddish color, not the heart [which rather
would give a black color to it]. In the left ventricle of the heart there is
not sufficient room for such abundant mixture, or activity able to give that
reddish color to it. Finally, the heart partition, since it is lacking the
vessels and mechanisms, is not suitable for similar communication and
elaboration, though something may possibly sweat through.” (pp. 170-171).
Understanding enriched by the senses
“Understanding is not only enriched by the sight, that makes us discover
many differences between things, but also by the objects of the other senses,
all of which present certain affinity with our luminous spirit. This affinity
comes from the substantial form of all, that is the light, and from the same
spiritual way to build each one. Since the sound and the scent are spirits,
and as such are perceived and act in us. The auditive perception takes place
exciting the inner spirit, in which the light of the soul and the rhythm of
the spiritual harmony reside.” (pp. 176-177).
Sense of smell, taste, tact
“Somewhat similar can be said of sense of smell. As far as the objects of
the taste and the tact are concerned, although they seem more corporal, they
have, however, capacity to stimulate the soul: those by the humidity, these
by the resistance.” (p. 177).
Anatomical topography of the functions
“There are four ventricles in the brain and three internal senses. The first
two ventricles constitute a single common sense, receiver of the images. The
thought is in the middle ventricle, and the memory in the last.” (p. 177).
The breathing
“Most of the inhaled air is led by the artery trachea to the lungs so that,
once elaborated by them, it continues until the pulmonary vein, in which it
is mixed with the reddish and fluid blood and is elaborated again. Next, all
the mixture is attracted by diastole from the left ventricle of the heart,
and in it, by the vigorous and the vivifying fire therein contained, it
acquires its definitive form and it becomes vital spirit, after having
expelled during the elaboration many dark vapors.” (p. 178).
God, aim of everything
“The aim of everything is man and the aim of man is God; God has done
everything for the man and by means of Christ, who is Alpha and Omega.” (p.
245).
Papal Pomp
“I have seen with my own eyes how he [the Pope] was carried on the shoulders
of the princes, with all the pom, waving crosses in their hands, and how the
pleople kneeled down to adore him in the streets. All those who managed to
kiss his feet or his sandals were considered more fortunate than the rest and
proclaimed to have obtained many indulgences to reduce the years of their
infernal suffering. Oh, the most evil of the beasts, the most shameless of
the harlots!” (p. 462).
The Pope is the Antichrist
“He who believes that the Pope is an Antichrist, he also has to believe that
the papal Trinity, infant baptism and the rest of the papal sacraments are
teachings of the devil. Jesus Christ, sweet liberator, who so frequently has
liberated people from the anxiety and misery, liberate us from the
continuation of Babylon, Antichrist and his tyranny and from his idolatry.” (
“Signa Sexaginta Regni, Antichristi, et reuelelatio eius, iam nunc praesens
(conclusio)” - Sixty Signs of the Kingdom of the Antichrist, Conclusion”,
p. 670).
The gift of curation
“One thing is certain: both the the prophets and also the apostles, besides
the gift to cure, made use of other remedies. For that reason they could
preserve with more facility the customary remedy, when using the gift of
curation, since Jews used to anoint themselves with oil for reasons of
cleanliness and health, and the anointing with oil was included amongst the
bessings of the Law. Likewise, in the Holy Scriptures to anoint with oil is
equivalent to applying a medicine.” (pp. 563-564).
Freedom and evil
“Our evil frequently turns our free will into a slave, when in certain
moments it raises the alternative of the freedom and it rejects it.” (p.
568).
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