Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries Part 10

Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries Part 10

[14] _Schriften_, i. p. 664. See also p. 662.

[15] For the doctrine of deification in Irenaeus see Harnack, _Hist. of Dogma_, ii. pp. 230-318.

[16] See _Schriften_, i. p. 768.

[17] _Ibid._ i. p. 767 a.

[18] _Schriften_, i. p. 767 a.

[19] _Die heilige Schrift_. x. d.

[20] _Ibid._ cviii. c.

[21] _Ibid._ ii. b.

[22] _Die heilige Schrift._ vi. and vii.

[23] _Vom Worte Gottes_, xxii. c.

[24] _Die heilige Schrift._ iv. b.

[25] _Catechismus vom Wort des Creutses, vom Wort Gottes, und vom Underscheide des Worts des Geists und Buchstabens._

[26] _Die heilige Schrift._ iv. c.

[27] _Schriften_, i. p. 725.

[28] _Ibid._ i. p. 634.

[29] _Schriften_, i. p. 380.

[30] See _ibid._ ii. p. 421.

[31] _Corpus Schwenck._ i. p. 295.

[32] _Schriften_, iii. A.

[33] _Schriften_, ii. p. 290.

[34] _Schriften_, ii. p. 785.

[35] _Ibid._ i. p. 768 b.

[36] _Schriften_, i. p. 513. For a criticism of the legalism of the Anabaptists see _ibid._ i. pp. 801-808.

[37] The details are given in Friederich Roth's _Augsburgs Reformations-Geschichte_ (Munchen, 1907), iii. p. 245 ff.

[38] _A Preservative or Treacle against the Poyson of Pelagius, etc._ (1551), A iii.

[39] For a fuller account of the Collegiants see Chap. VII.

[40] _Schriften_, iii. B, p. 572.

[41] _Ibid._ ii. p. 783.

[42] _Ibid._ a. p. 784.

[43] _Ibid._ iii. A, p. 146.

[44] _Schriften_, ii. p. 785.

[45] _Ibid._ ii. p. 783.

[46] _Ibid._ iii. A, p. 74.

[47] Franck's _Chronica_ (1531), p. ccccli.

[48] Rutherford, _A Survey of the Spiritual Antichrist_ (1648), chap. v.

{88}

CHAPTER VI

SEBASTIAN CASTELLIO: A FORGOTTEN PROPHET[1]

Reformation history has been far too closely confined to a few main highways of thought, and few persons therefore realize how rich in ideas and how complex in typical religious conceptions this spiritual upheaval really was. The types that prevailed and won their way to wide favour have naturally compelled attention and are adequately known. There were, however, very serious and impressive attempts made to give the Reformation a totally different course from the one it finally took in history, and these attempts, defeated by the sweep of the main current, became submerged, and their dedicated and heroic leaders became forgotten. Many of these spiritual ventures which for the moment failed and were submerged are in striking parallelism with currents of thought to-day, and our generation can perhaps appreciate at their real worth these solitary souls who were destined to see their cause defeated, to hear their names defamed, and to live in jeopardy among the very people whom they most longed to help.

Sebastian Castellio is one of these submerged venturers. While he lived he was so absolutely absorbed in the battle for truth that he took no pains at all to acquaint posterity with the details of his life, or to make his name quick and powerful in the ears of men. When he died {89} and laid down the weapons of his spiritual warfare his pious opponents thanked G.o.d for the relief and did what they could to consign him to oblivion. But after the long and silent flow of years the world has come up to his position and can appreciate a spirit who was too far in advance of the line of march to be comprehended in his lifetime. He was born in the little French village of St. Martin du Fresne--not many miles west of Lake Geneva in the year 1515. The home was pinched with poverty, but somebody in the home or in the village discovered that little Bastian was endowed with unusual gifts and must be given the chance to realize the life which his youth forecast; and that ancient family sacrifice, which has glorified so many homes of poverty, was made here in St. Martin, and the boy, possessed with his eager pa.s.sion for knowledge, was started on his course in the College de la Trinite in Lyons. He soon found himself bursting into a new world, the world of cla.s.sic antiquity, which the Humanists were restoring to the youth of that period, and he experienced that emanc.i.p.ating leap of soul and thrill of joy which such a world of beauty can produce upon a lofty spirit that sees and appreciates it.

Some time during the Lyons period he came also under a still greater and more emanc.i.p.ating influence, the divine and simple Christ of the Gospels, whom the most serious of the Humanists had rediscovered, and to whom Castellio now dedicated the central loyalty of his soul.

At twenty-five years of age, now a splendid cla.s.sical scholar, radiant with faith and hope and the vision of a new age for humanity which the recovered gospel was to bring in, Castellio went to Strasbourg to share the task of the Reformers and to put his life into the new movement.

Calvin, then living in Strasbourg, received the brilliant recruit with joy and took him into his own home. When the great Reformer returned to Geneva in 1541 to take up the mighty task of his life he summoned Castellio to help him, and made him Princ.i.p.al of the College of Geneva, which Calvin planned to make one of the {90} foremost seats of Greek learning and one of the most illuminating centres for the study of the Scriptures. The young scholar's career seemed a.s.sured. He had the friendship of Calvin, he was head of an important inst.i.tution of learning, the opportunity for creative literary work was opening before him, and he was aspiring soon to fulfil the clearest call of his life--to become a minister of the new gospel. His first contribution to religious literature was his volume of "Sacred Dialogues," a series of vivid scenes out of the Old and New Testaments, told in dialogue fashion, both in Latin and French.[2] They were to serve a double purpose: first, to teach French boys to read Latin, and secondly, to form in them a love for the great characters of the Bible and an appreciation of its lofty message of life. The stories were really good stories, simple enough for children, and yet freighted with a depth of meaning which made them suitable for mature minds. Their success was extraordinary, and their fine quality was almost universally recognized. They went through twenty-eight editions in their author's lifetime, and they were translated into many languages.[3] His bent toward a religion of a deeply ethical and spiritual type already appears in this early work, and here he announces a principle that was to rule his later life and was to cost him much suffering: "The friend of Truth obeys not the mult.i.tude _but the Truth_."

At the very time this book was appearing, an opportunity offered for testing the mettle of his courage. One of those ever-recurrent plagues that hara.s.sed former ages, before microbes were discovered, fell upon Geneva. The minister, who had volunteered to give spiritual comfort to those who were suffering with the plague in the hospital, was stricken with the dread disease, and a new volunteer was asked for. The records of the city show that Castellio, though not yet ordained, and under no obligation to take such risk, offered himself for the {91} hazardous service when the ministers of the city declined it. The ordination through human hands was, however, never to come to him, and a harder test of courage than the plague was before him. In the course of his studies he found himself compelled to take the position that the "Song of Solomon" was an ancient love poem, and that the traditional interpretation of it as a revelation of the true relation between Christ and the Church was a strained and unnatural interpretation. He also felt that as a scholar he could not with intellectual honesty agree with the statement in the Catechism that "Christ descended into h.e.l.l." Calvin challenged both these positions of Castellio, but his opposition to him was clearly far deeper than a difference of opinion on these two points. Calvin instinctively felt that the bold and independent spirit of this young scholar, his qualities of leadership, and his literary genius marked him out as a man who could not long be an easy-minded and supple subordinate. A letter which Calvin wrote at this time to his friend Viret shows where the real tension lay.

"Castellio has got it into his head," he writes, "that I want to rule!"

The great Reformer may not have been conscious yet of such a purpose, but there can be no question that Castellio read the signs correctly, and he was to be the first, as Buisson has said, to discover that "to resist Calvin was in the mind of the latter, to resist the Holy Ghost."[4] Calvin successfully opposed his ordination, and made it impossible for him to continue in Geneva his work as an honest scholar.

To remain meant that he must surrender his right of independent judgment, he must cease to follow the line of emanc.i.p.ated scholarship, he must adjust his conscience to fit the ideas that were coming to be counted orthodox in the circle of the Reformed faith. _That_ surrender he could no more make than Luther could surrender to the demands of his opponents at Worms. He quietly closed up his work in the College of Geneva and went into voluntary exile, to seek a sphere of life where he might think and speak as {92} he saw the truth and where he could keep his conscience a pure virgin.

He settled in Basle, where Erasmus had found a refuge, and where, two years before, the exiled and hunted Sebastian Franck, the spiritual forerunner of Castellio, had died in peace. For ten years (1545-1555) he lived with his large family in pitiable poverty. He read proof for the Humanist printer Oporin, he fished with a boat-hook for drift-wood along the sh.o.r.es of the Rhine,--"rude labour no doubt," he says, "but honest, and I do not blush for having done it,"--and he did whatever honest work he could find that would help keep body and soul together.

Through all these years, every moment of the day that could be saved from bread-winning toil, and much of his night-time, went into the herculean task to which he had dedicated himself--the complete translation of the Bible from its original languages into both Latin and French.[5] Being himself one of the common people he always had the interests and needs of the common people in view, and he put the Bible into current sixteenth-century speech. His French translation has the marked characteristics of the Renaissance period. He makes patriarchs, prophets, and the persons of the New Testament live again in his vivid word-pictures, as the great contemporary painters were making them live on their canvases. But that which gave his translation its great human merit and popular interest was a serious defect in the eyes of the theologians. It was vivid, full of the native Oriental colour, true in the main to the original, and strong in its appeal to religious imagination, but painfully weak in its support of the dogmas and doctrines around which the theological battles of the Reformation were centring. Still less were the theologians pleased with the Preface of his Latin Bible, dedicated to the boy-king of England, Edward VI. Here he boldly insists that the Reformation, {93} wherever it spreads, shall champion the principle of _free conscience_, and shall wage its battles with spiritual weapons alone. The only enemies of our faith, he says, are vices, and vices can be conquered only by virtues. The Christ who said if they strike you on one cheek turn the other, has called us to the spiritual task of instructing men in the truth, and that work can never be put into the hands of an executioner! "I address you, O king," he concludes, "not as a prophet sent from G.o.d, but as a man of the people who abhors quarrels and hatred, and who wishes to see religion spread by love rather than by fierce controversy, by purity of heart rather than by external methods.

. . . Read these sacred writings with a pious and religious heart, and prepare yourself to reign as a mortal man who must give an account to immortal G.o.d. I desire that you may have the meekness of Moses, the piety of David, and the wisdom of Solomon."[6]

Two years after this appeal to the new Protestantism to make the great venture of spreading its truth by love and persuasion, there came from Geneva the decisive answer in the burning of Servetus, followed by the famous _Defence_ before the world, written mainly by Calvin, of the course that had been taken. One month later, a brief Latin work appeared from the press with the t.i.tle, _De haereticis, an sint persequendi, etc._ (Magdeburgi, 1554), followed in very short time by a French edition (Rouen, 1554). The body of the work contained impressive pa.s.sages in favour of toleration from Church Fathers, from Luther, Erasmus, Sebastian Franck, and others, concluding with a pa.s.sage from "Basil Montfort," a name which thinly veils Bastian Castellio himself. The Preface was addressed to the Duke of Wurtemberg, bore the name of "Martinus Bellius," and was beyond doubt written by Castellio, who inspired and directed the entire work, in which he was a.s.sisted by a very small group of refugees in Basle of similar ideas on this subject to his {94} own. This Preface is one of the mother doc.u.ments on freedom of conscience, from which in time came a large offspring, and it is, furthermore, an interesting interpretation of a type of Christianity then somewhat new in the world. Its simplicity, its human appeal, its restrained emotional power, its prophetic tone, its sincerity and depth of earnestness mark it as a distinct work of genius, almost in the cla.s.s with Pascal's _Provincial Letters_.

"If thou, ill.u.s.trious Prince, had informed thy subjects that thou wert coming to visit them at an unnamed time and had requested them to be prepared in white garments to meet thee on thy coming; what wouldst thou do, if, on arrival, thou shouldst find that instead of robing themselves in white they had occupied themselves in violent debate about thy person--some insisting that thou wert in France, others that thou wert in Spain; some declaring that thou would come on horseback, others that thou would come by chariot; some holding that thou would come with great pomp, others that thou would come without train or following? And what especially wouldst thou say if they debated not only with words but with blows of fist and strokes of sword, and if some succeeded in killing and destroying others who differed from them?