I borrow the good if troubled name of the (here Latinized) Spanish physician, Michael Servetus. "Michael Servetus," wrote one of his biographers, "is the only Christian to have been burned by Catholics in effigy, and by Protestants [John Calvin] in actuality."
Apart from his significant accomplishments in medicine, which he may well have learned or borrowed in part from the then comparatively advanced Muslims ("Moors"), he was interested, to a fatal fault, it turned out, in Theology. Although he was Latin literate, he lived during a time, the Reformation, when the Bible was being translated and printed into the common vernacular languages of Europe. He published and defended his controversial "On the Errors of the Trinity" and doggedly insisted that John Calvin, who considered the position heretical, engage him in debate, public or private. Instead, and although Calvin did repeatedly warn him in advance against doing so, when Servetus re-entered Geneva, then a theocracy with Calvin as chief theocrat, Calvin had him arrested, tried and burned slowly at the stake. "Misericordia," Latin for "mercy," he is said to have cried out at his last.
The burning of Servetus in some ways marked a turning point in Christian Europe, a crisis of conscience, and initiated or contributed to a debate which, ultimately, led to an articulation of the so called Natural Law and to the "Rights of Man," ideas which found their way to the New World and into the US Constitution.
Some Unitarians, who have claimed the man as their own, would like to canonize Servetus and make him a saint and founding father, but, to me, he seems far from saintly, just fully, tragically human. I share a lot of similarities -or, rather, affinities- with the man, though not necessarily doctrinal. I am not entirely serious here, but, this time around, I am guarding my step, only stayed at the airport in Geneva and didn't venture out into the city from there, have a better sense of humor, am more interested in History than Theology, and certainly don't want to be spitting up any charcoal, even if it comes from my feathered peace-pipe or bong.
