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The Workings of the Heart Reverend Amy Zucker October 12, 2003 Palo Alto, CA
The man on the cover of your order of service is Miguel Serveto, who Latinized his name to Michael Servetus in the custom of university-educated people of his time. He was born in 1511 in a Catholic country, into a Catholic Church that was about to be rocked by a revolution. The last of the Holy Roman Emperors ruled Western Europe and defined Christianity, as the Emperors had done since Constantine had became a Christian, twelve centuries earlier. The Inquisition held sway in Servetus’s native country of Spain. But when Servetus was not yet six years old, Martin Luther attacked the church that had become so corrupted and complacent, and in the new age of books, his criticism became a best-seller.
Suddenly, not only did Catholicism have a very serious challenger within Western Europe, but non-monastics, who had new easy access to the Bible, were being encouraged to read it and were beginning to draw their own conclusions. Additions and deletions that church censors had made to Scripture in order to shore up Church doctrine were now visible to literate laypeople. For example, Erasmus discovered that the 7th verse of the 5th chapter of 1 John, that was in the Latin Bible he had been taught, was not in the Greek manuscripts to which he went back when he decided to retranslate the Bible. The passage, which he deleted on the basis of its being a late addition, read, “For there are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost: and these three are one.”
Servetus was not only literate, he was a brilliant scholar. He studied medicine and in that era when a medical student was lucky if he saw the inside of a human body once or twice, he described in great detail and with uncanny accuracy the workings of the heart: how it has four chambers, how one of them pumps the blood to the lungs, where it gains a new substance from the air; how that substance is distributed around the body by the action of another chamber of the heart. Oxygen had not yet been discovered–his fellow heretic, Joseph Priestly, would discover it in the 18th century--but Servetus understood the principle. In so doing, he was 75 years ahead of William Harvey, who is commonly credited with being the first to describe how the heart works. But we can’t blame the historians; only three copies of Servetus’s description of the circulatory system survived, because the medical information was tucked into a much longer volume that was mostly about theology, and the vast majority of his books were burned along with him.
Servetus also knew five languages by the age of twenty, and his curiosity, brilliance, and religious passion made an explosive combination. The discovery that the Trinity as he had been taught it had only the feeblest of Scriptural support galvanized him. We know that now, and can look back at the Council of Nicaea in the year 325 to see how the question was decided, the Trinitarian view was declared orthodoxy, and the Unitarian view of Arius, heresy. But Servetus learned it by examining the Bible, which he accepted as the word of God, and when he wrote his book On the Errors of the Trinity, and his later book The Restoration of Christianity, he was trying to do just that: restore Christianity, not refute it.
In fact, he wasn’t opposed to the idea of a Trinity per se–just the doctrine that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit were three distinct persons. Arius had argued at the Council of Nicaea that in order to be God’s Son, Jesus could not have existed from the beginning like God, but must have been a man created by the Father. To Servetus, too, Christ was man made divine and the manifestation of God on earth, and the Holy Spirit was “the Divine impulse within us.” (Introduction to Book VII of On the Errors of the Trinity) Both, in other words, were expressions of the one true and indivisible God. That sounds pretty orthodox to us, but it was the most dangerous of heresies in the sixteenth century, a position that brought the wrath of both the Inquisition and the Reformers onto anyone who declared it.
Servetus had high hopes for the Reformation, which had so bravely taken on the mighty power of the Catholic empire. But as his biographers Lawrence and Nancy Goldstone write, “what [he] had not taken into account was that it does not take very long for revolutions to turn reactionary.” We see it again and again through history. Napoleon at first embodied the French Revolution, but his revolutionary fervor died away as he gained power. Beethoven famously named his third symphony “The Buonaparte” in admiration for the early Napoleon, but when Napoleon declared himself Emperor, Beethoven tore up the title page (which is why we now know the symphony as the “Eroica”). He grieved: “he too is nothing more than an ordinary man . . . he will place himself above everyone else and become a tyrant!” The Russian Revolution overthrew the totalitarianism of centuries when it brought the rule of the Czars to an end, but Stalin soon rivalled Ivan the Terrible for ruthless despotism. Even our American Revolution, and the Constitution which proclaimed radical independence for the individual, have been eroded from within time and again by “loyalty acts” and governments that simply ignore the Bill of Rights. Keeping the revolutionary spirit alive is a matter of constant vigilance.
Servetus was on the Inquisition’s Most Wanted list, but when, 450 years ago this month, he was burned at the stake, his books strapped to his body, his executioner was one of the great reformers, John Calvin. Calvin, too, had stood up against Catholicism only to create a Christian state in Geneva that rivalled the Inquisition for its nightmarish theocracy. In Calvin’s Protestant utopia, smiling in church resulted in three days in prison; playing the fiddle, in banishment; brawling in execution. The most horrific punishment was saved for those who committed heresy and therefore endangered not the bodies or property of others, but their souls. So went the reasoning, and so although some begged Calvin to commute Servetus’s punishment to mere beheading, he made sure the heretic died of torture. Servetus never recanted, and it is said that his dying words followed the careful distinction he had made in his books: he cried out not to “Jesus, Eternal Son of God,” but “Jesus, Son of the Eternal God.”
Two hundred years after Servetus’s death, a branch of American Congregationalism flowered into Unitarianism. The name was a taunt, but William Ellery Channing claimed it proudly in his sermon “Unitarian Christianity,” declaring like Servetus that one does not have to be Trinitarian to be Christian. But the reason we are Servetus’s spiritual descendants is not that we follow his doctrine, but because we follow the free path of heresy, which means “choice.”
The doctrine itself is not so important. The controversy between Unitarian and Trinitarian ideas of God is of little interest to most UUs nowadays. For one thing, many of us are atheists, which rather cuts through the Gordian knot of that little theological dispute. For another, many of us who are theists do not worship a God who is a transcendent being at all, but instead invoke the divine power within us and the world. Many Christian UUs do not worship Jesus as God, but follow him as the greatest moral and spiritual teacher they know. And, given our pluralism, I see no reason why a UU cannot embrace the trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, or for that matter, the trinity of Mother, Maiden, and Crone.
But what Servetus bequeathed us with his life and martyrdom that we still cherish, that is at the very heart of who we are, is utter freedom of belief. He maintained his convictions through exile, prison, and mortal torment. Given that heritage, I hope that we can maintain ours through milder punishments such as scorn and rejection. And then, too, given our heritage, I hope we can create a religion in which we never inflict scorn and rejection on those whose theologies differ from ours.
Are we living up to that example? Are thoughts free in this movement, in this congregation, in the ranks of Unitarian Universalism, or do we censor one another, or censor ourselves? Can we openly share of our hearts here, even when–especially when–our theologies diverge?
Theodore Parker, Channing’s younger contemporary and one of the founders of the Transcendentalist movement that included Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, and Henry David Thoreau, came close to being tried by his peers for heresy. His radical theological views so troubled some of his Unitarian colleagues that they refused to exchange pulpits with him, and the mid-19th-century was an era in which pulpit exchange was a vital part of any minister’s leadership. You see, the position of revolutionaries is always a tricky one. They have just taken the risky step of disagreeing with the orthodoxy of their day. When some among them take the revolution even farther, the original reformers get nervous, because the radicals are fulfilling all the dire prophecies the orthodox had made. The Unitarians had gone and declared the Trinity unScriptural, and taken a lot of heat for it; and now here was this young troublemaker Parker declaring that lots of things that were in Scripture were not meant to stand for all time, but were transient. He was taking the revolution much farther than they’d intended. He was being a heretic among the heretics.
The most conservative among his colleagues accused him of promoting just that: “the latest heresy.” And for there to be a heresy, there must be orthodoxy. Is that what Unitarianism had become, he challenged them?–a new orthodoxy to replace the old one they had only recently overthrown? He wrote:
Gentlemen [he wrote,] it is not altogether plain why you put yourselves in your peculiar attitude toward me. As you have not as yet made a public statement of your theological beliefs, I must beg you to inform me what is Orthodoxy according to the Boston Association. . . . [F]or surely it were not charitable that a body of Christian ministers would censure and virtually condemn one of their number for heresy, unless they had made personal investigation of the whole matter, had themselves agreed on their standard of orthodoxy, and were quite ready to place that standard before the eyes of the whole people.
To their credit, his colleagues in the Boston Association never did write up a Unitarian orthodoxy; Parker kept his pulpit and gradually returned to favor, and in the way of heretics, is now firmly established as one of our most distinguished forebears.
So, what about today? When someone differs from the current UU norm, do we fear them as heretics, revile them as throwbacks, or embrace them as living out the true UU spirit of free inquiry? In the past year, the UUA President, Bill Sinkford, stirred up considerable controversy by suggesting that we lack a language of reverence. On the pendulum swing of UU theology, the mind has been ascendant in recent decades; in a sense, Sinkford is trying to ensure that we make space for the workings of the heart as well. A storm of protest resulted, and more important than Sinkford’s theological opinion, in my view, was his response to the protest: he thanked those who disagreed with him for joining the conversation and hoped we would all continue. We will be doing that here later this year, in a forum on “the language of reverence.”
To my way of thinking, in order to proudly claim the heritage of Servetus, it is not enough for us to tolerate one another’s differences. We should thank the Christians, Pagans, theists, atheists, humanists, fill in the blank, in the seats next to us for the courage of their convictions. They are choosing–being heretical–and they are bravely stating their choice. We may not agree, but we are enriched by the diversity. It saves us from turning our beautiful faith of the free into just the latest orthodoxy.
And we need not be afraid that our fragile truth will collapse under the pressure of competing points of view. John Milton was not a Unitarian, but he was a Puritan, which was a risky proposition in his time and place, and he wrote some articles that sum up the UU faith in continuous heresy. Lines from them are compiled in our hymnal, as reading number 671:
Our faith and knowledge thrive by exercise, as well as our limbs and complexion. If the waters of truth flow not in a perpetual progression, they sicken into a muddy pool of conformity and tradition. The light which we have gained was given us not to be ever staring on, but by it to discover onward things more remote from our knowledge.
Where there is much desire to learn, there of necessity will be much arguing, much writing, many opinions. Give me liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties.
. . . . And though all the winds of doctrine were let loose to play upon the earth, so truth be in the field, we do injuriously to misdoubt her strength. For who knows not that truth is strong, next to the Almighty; she needs no policies, no stratagems, to make her victorious. Let her and falsehood grapple; whoever knew truth put to the worse in a free and open encounter.
I can’t say I share Milton’s optimism. I can think of all too many examples in which falsehood won over truth–perhaps I’m just not taking a long enough view. But even so, I embrace his ideal, and believe that we can do no differently than he urges if we are to be truly free. We must trust in the workings of our own hearts and the hearts of our brothers and sisters beside us. We must have faith in the strength of truth and open conversation, or else we become like Parker’s colleagues, holding on to our old heresies so tightly that they petrify into another orthodoxy. We even, minus the bloodshed of course, become like Calvin, fearing difference more than we love freedom.
In honor of Servetus, and Parker, and all the others who lived and died in the courage of their convictions; in sorrow for Calvin, and Napoleon, and all great revolutionaries who devolved into despots; in respect for the mind and the heart–may we live in the spirit of heresy. May we think, and feel, and speak as free people. Amen.
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