According to my trusty calendar of events relevant to Unitarians and Universalists, Frank Schulman’s This Day in Unitarian Universalist History, on this day in 1553, Michael Servetus was executed at a place called Champel, near Geneva in Switzerland.
I find Servetus one of those singularly interesting people, someone I’m almost certain I would not like as an individual, but who stands as a fierce advocate for freedom of thought.
A Spaniard who worked as a lawyer, he was also a keen observer of the human condition as well as someone who thought deeply about the theological questions of his day. In his youth he traveled to Rome where he was appalled at the state of the papacy. This fired his decision to examine the scriptures with a lawyerly eye. From that examination he came up with a theological reflection that while not actually unitarian, was clearly a rejection of the dominant, actually at that time and place the only acceptable view of the nature of god as a trinity. Reasoning from the scriptures he came up with a view of god that did not include the Holy Spirit, which, if one chooses to read the scriptures is only vaguely alluded to there…
Having published his opinions and with that suffering charges of heresy that led to his fleeing his native Spain to France, he appears to have been constitutionally incapable of remaining silent and while in France continued to publish his reflections and opinions. His most famous publication was his study On the Errors of the Trinity.
Fearing the Inquisition, quite reasonably, he decided to flee to the relative freedom of Poland. For reasons completely unfathomable to me, he accepted a letter of safe passage from the theocratic dictator in Geneva, John Calvin. As it turned out, a bad move…
Servetus was arrested, given a farce of a trial, and then burned at the stake with his various writings tied to his thigh.
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