The Ark

Author of several works condemning the persecution of "heretics" the French Protestant, Sebastian Castellio became a critic of John Calvin's Geneva saying that "if Jesus Christ entered Geneva he'd be burned at the stake!" Castellio was an early champion of the role of reason and doubt in true faith. His story is told by Perez Zagorin, author of How the Idea of Religious Toleration Came to the West.

Transcript

This transcript was typed from a recording of the program. The ABC cannot guarantee its complete accuracy because of the possibility of mishearing and occasional difficulty in identifying speakers.

THEME & FX OF FIGHTING

Rachael Kohn: The Slaughter of the Innocents in France, where Catholics rounded up the Protestants and forced them at the point of a sword to confess belief in the holy Catholic church. Refusal was met with a quick cut to the throat.

Hello, this is The Ark, and I'm Rachael Kohn.

On the eve of the religious civil war that began in 1562, the boy-King Charles IX and his mother, the Queen Regent, Catherine de Medici, hoped to pacify the country by issuing an edict of toleration for the French Protestants. But passions were aflame, and not even the King could stop the bloody civil war that ensued. The idea of religious toleration was not yet a belief.

This is the context in which Sebastian Castellio, a French Protestant, emerged. He was to become a major critic of religious persecution not only by Catholics but also by Protestants, like John Calvin and his Reformed Church in Geneva. Given the Reformation which Martin Luther had unleashed a generation before, it was a time of both optimism and great suffering for the Protestants, as the historian Perez Zagorin explains.

Perez Zagorin: Well it was a great time for Protestantism in one sense, because of course, the Protestantism was growing, but it was also under constant repression and persecution, and Castellio, when he lived in Lyon, saw Protestants there burnt at the stake for heresy. But he was converted I think, by exposure to Calvin's Institutes of the Christian Religion. He was reading the first edition. That book went through a number of editions before it reached its final form, and it's an enormously important work in the history of Protestantism, and modern Christianity. It's one of the definitive works of Protestantism and the teachings in that book would have attracted him in various ways. He was very much impressed by Calvin, because he went to see him in Strasbourg.

Rachael Kohn: Why did Calvin refuse to let him be ordained when he requested this?

Perez Zagorin: Castellio was a teacher in Geneva and was discharging important responsibilities, but he did want to be a pastor. I think Calvin must have sensed something in Castellio that made him uneasy about letting him become a pastor, perhaps some strain of independence which of course did prove to be very much the case. For whatever reasons, as the time passed I think Castellio spent four years in Geneva teaching, and in close contact with Calvin, and as time passed I think Castellio came to feel that Calvin was unjust, that he had far too great influence, that he had a kind of a dictatorial personality.

Rachael Kohn: Well Castellio would, like Erasmus, become very interested in the question of religious toleration, and he certainly hurled some accusations against Calvin at this time. Was his stand against the persecution of heretics an echo from Erasmus before him?

Perez Zagorin: Castellio was a humanist, and came to Protestantism through humanism. Though a poor boy, he got a humanistic education and he was profoundly influenced by classical literature, and he was deeply interested of course in the Bible in the early transmission of the Biblical text.

Erasmus was a humanist, and Calvin himself, before his conversion to Protestantism, had been given a humanistic education, and even published as one of his very first works, an edition of the tract called De Clementia, On Mercy, Mercifulness, by the Roman Stoic writer, Seneca.

I wouldn't say it was an echo, but I was stressing a moment ago the humanistic background in the case of Castellio, I think that he was very much influenced by Erasmus, and I'm not sure about all the things that he read of Erasmus, but I think he synthesised with Erasmus' view that persecution was not the way to deal with heresy, and I think he also picked up on the idea and gave it a much greater development than Erasmus ever did, of the difference between very essential truths that reason itself would not question in the Christian religion and those other things that were secondary and were difficult.

Castellio repeatedly stressed that certain parts of the Scriptures were obscure and they were not easy to understand and that people could disagree about that, and this was a view that Erasmus himself had held.

Rachael Kohn: That's an interesting development for the individual conscience, as it were.

Perez Zagorin: But I might point out that the people who fear this idea, spoke about Erasmus earlier, and about Castellio himself as if they were sceptics, because of this point of view. They were not sceptics, they were really profound believers, but what they believed in was a certain set of truths, which they did not think were hard to accept, and which I think they really believed were if not demonstrable, at least knowable by reason.

Castellio always thought that the existence of God was something that no sensible, intelligent man could possibly deny, and he didn't regard that as a debatable question at all. But questions like the Trinity, questions about souls after death, questions about whether baptism should be infancy or whether there should be believers' baptism when people come to an age of discretion, those questions he thought, could be discussed, and differences of opinion should be permitted.

Rachael Kohn: Well how serious was the persecution of so-called heretics during the life of Castellio; what would he have seen?

Perez Zagorin: Well he died in 1563 I believe, and by that time he'd had all kinds of examples of persecution before him, not just the legal persecution by inquisitional tribunals and so on in The Netherlands, in France, in Spain and other Catholic countries. He would have known about the persecution of Protestants during the reign of Queen Mary in England between 1553-'58, but he would also have known about the coming civil war in France. He wrote a book just as it began, to deplore it. And there one had massacres, I mean violent collisions between Catholics and Protestants. Hundreds of people, if not I think thousands of people between the 1530s and the 1560s had perished or been forced to go into exile because of charges of heresy and because of persecution.

Rachael Kohn: I gather he got fairly exercised when Michael Servetus was burnt at the stake; can you tell that story?

Perez Zagorin: Well yes. Servetus was a Spaniard, and he was brilliant, but a difficult, argumentative person who offended many people and was keen to have a reputation as a very extreme heretic. He was an astrologer, a physician, a Biblical scholar and a theologian, and he wrote works that made him notorious, and he was in such danger of his life that he had to live for many years under an assumed identity. And he'd corresponded with Calvin, and Calvin found him extremely irritating and in one of his latest books that he had published, Servetus, who did some letters that he and Calvin had exchanged, and Calvin had actually once said that if Servetus ever put foot in Geneva, he would see that he never left the city alive.

And when Servetus was arrested and tried by the Inquisition in the city of Vienne, in the south of France where he was living in the south-east of France, he succeeded in escaping, and I think he was probably on his way to Italy, when he came to Geneva on a Sunday in 1553 I think he may have attended church there, he was recognised and arrested, and he was then charged by the Geneva authorities, the city government, with heresy, and Calvin was one of the principal witnesses, and instruments in this trial and condemnation.

Servetus was sentenced to be burnt, and he was burnt in October of 1553, and this event caused a sensation throughout the Protestant world because Calvin was a Protestant leader and Servettas was a very well-known figure. Followers of Calvin himself were under persecution in France, in The Netherlands, in parts of Germany, in parts of the holy Roman Empire, and that Calvin should make himself the instrument of persecution in this way, and burn Servettas and burn his books, was something that some Protestants found unacceptable. These Protestants included people who were themselves refugees in other Swiss cities besides Geneva, in Basle, in Zurich and elsewhere, and Calvin felt some discomfort at this reaction and he actually wrote a book in defence of persecution and the killing of heretics, as a result of his feeling that he needed to make some reply to the criticisms which were directed against him for his involvement in Servetus' death.

Rachael Kohn: But wasn't that the inevitable consequence of having set up a theocracy in Geneva? I think Castellio called Calvin 'the Protestant Pope'.

Perez Zagorin: The existence of a theocracy made it possible for Calvin, though he was himself only a pastor and a private citizen, to become as time passed, he had many opponents in Geneva, to become as time passed, the dominant figure in the civic life of the city, and because Geneva attracted refugees from France and elsewhere, it became a kind of a centre of European Protestantism.

But it wasn't the theocracy, it was the whole rationale of religious persecution, which was so widely accepted. The idea that religious unity required that the expression of opinions that were contrary to orthodoxy had to be suppressed, that religious unity was an absolute prerequisite for political unity, that those people who disagreed were acting out of reasons of pride, and obstinacy.

There was a general view which had been expressed by St Augustine and others, that the mother of heresy is pride. There was a whole rationale, a whole set of propositions that sanctioned religious persecution. I call it the Christian Theory of Persecution, and it was a theory that Calvin shared with Catholics. And without that theory, Servetus would never have been tried. There were many questions, by the way, about the actual legality of Servettas' trial because the magistrates of Geneva had no jurisdiction over him. He was merely someone passing through. He had done nothing in Geneva to attract attention, or to bring legal charges against him, it was simply his reputation as a heretic, and Calvin's knowledge of him that led to his arrest and to his ultimate condemnation and execution.

Rachael Kohn: Well this brings me finally to Castellio's own view of heresy, which I think he rather doubted as a category. He seemed to think that people had differences of opinion and that heresy itself was a questionable concept. That's an interesting and rather modern point of view.

Perez Zagorin: I suppose you could call it the modern point of view. As a historian who is interested especially in placing things, and understanding them in their own time, I tend to shy away from the notion of modernity in the sense of Castellio somehow anticipating us today, but it was a daring point of view. It was very, very hard to attack the conception of heresy.

Castellio never said heresy is nonsense, there's no such thing. But he did say - I made an investigation into this subject, and all that I can find is that we call somebody a heretic and we saw heresy exists when we find that somebody disagrees with us. And in his writings, which are of the greatest importance in the undermining of the Christian theory of persecution, in his writings I think he does throw doubt on the existence of heresy. He does tend to dissolve it, because he comes to see and he makes very clear, that every religious person thinks that he has the truth, and that there are many truths for which people are convicted for heresy, which cannot be determined and on which there can only be differences of opinion and charitable acceptance of difference.

Rachael Kohn: Perez Zagorin is the author of How the Idea of Religious Toleration Came to the West, and he resides in Charlottesville, Virginia.

He'll be back next week when the English Puritan, John Locke is in the spotlight. From the turmoil of the English Civil War, he gave us the philosophical template of religious toleration and turned it into a constitutional right.

That's on The Ark, next week at this time.

THEME

Guests

Perez Zagorin
is Joseph C. Wilson Professor of History Emeritus at the University of Rochester in the United States. He is a Fellow of the Shannon Center for Advanced Studies at the University of Virginia and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has written a number of books, including The Court and the Country and Francis Bacon.

Further Information

Sebastian Castellio and the Struggle for Freedom of Conscience
http://www.socinian.org/castellio.html

Publications

Title: How the Idea of Religious Toleration Came to the West
Author : Perez Zagorin
Publisher: Princeton University Press, 2003