Dr. John Young 9/14/08
Unitarian Universalist Church of Jacksonville
Early Unitarians
Unitarians have a tendency to consider themselves outside of history, as if we had invented our religion ourselves. Since our tradition is not dogmatic or creedal, we each have freedom of belief, and most of us have evolving faiths and practices, there is obviously some truth in this stance. However, we are inheritors of a rich and hard-fought denominational history; it is important that we know about our denominational history and remember it. For, as the saying goes, ‘those who forget history are bound to be forced to repeat it.’
History is complex and imperfectly remembered, and so, as Emerson suggested, in order to get a grip on history, these great movements of cultures and ideas, it is necessary to shrink history down to biographies we can grasp. That is what I will do today by telling you about three men from the sixteenth century: Michael Servetus [1511-1553], Faustus Socinus [1539-1604] and Francis David [1510-1579].
The classic text for pre-20th century Unitarian history is Earl Morse Wilbur’s, A History of Unitarianism, published in two volumes first in 1945 by our own UUA’s Beacon Press. A denomination tends to be popularly characterized by certain beliefs. Unitarianism’s central beliefs were consistent adherence to the singularity of God and the subordinate rank of Christ to God, thus our name Unitarian. Wilbur said that, in the few periods when Unitarians were relatively free from persecution and not busy defending ourselves against attack, that our denomination clearly emphasized personal conduct and character.
Wilbur believed that you could sum up Unitarian history in three principles: freedom, reason, and tolerance. Freedom meaning complete mental freedom in religion rather than bondage to creeds or confessions; reason meaning the unrestricted use of reason in religion, rather than reliance upon external authority or past traditions; and, tolerance meaning a generous toleration for differing religious views and practices rather than insistence upon uniformity in doctrine, worship or polity. For Unitarians dogma is regularly resisted; reason is the ultimate court of appeal, and Unitarians have been far more concerned with the spirit of Christianity than the letter. Unitarian tolerance means only openness to new ideas but acceptance of diversity, not just putting up with human variety but trying our best to be loving in our every day lives.
Michael Servetus was a Spaniard whose father was a significant local official in northern Spain. At 16, Michael was sent across the Pyrenees to Toulouse, France, then the greatest law school in Europe. He began, secretly, to read the Bible for himself with a group of fellow students as a foundation for the laws. This transformed his sense of vocation from jurist to religious reformer. When Servetus published his book at age 20, on the Errors of the Doctrine of the Trinity, he could already read in Spanish, French, Latin, Greek, and Hebrew. In the generation just preceding Michael’s birth, almost a million Jews had been banished from Spain and many thousands of Islamic Moors had been burned at the stake. Heresies were ruthlessly suppressed, and the Protestant Reformation was just being born. Servetus became the personal assistant to the Holy Roman Emperor’s court preacher and went with him to Rome to see the Pope. Servetus was horrified. For Servetus, their pomp and arrogance represented ultimate wickedness in religious guise.
Servetus’ Errors of the Doctrine of the Trinity inflamed religious debate by arguing persuasively for the unity of God, the falsity of the doctrine of the Trinity, the personality of Jesus, and the need for Christianity to return to its ancient roots, that worshipped a single just God by living with love with our neighbors, reading and interpreting the Bible for ourselves, informed by reason and our life experiences and focusing upon Jesus’ lessons of love and daily living, rather than dogma, hierarchy, or repression. In his next book, Servetus challenged Luther and Calvin to actually put into practice the doctrines of Christian works, rather than replacing the corruptions of Catholicism with corruptions and repressions of their own. Servetus argued that a faith without true Christian spirit was no Christianity at all. His final religious works laid out a systematic return of Christianity to the Christianity of Jesus rather than the corrupted Christianity of Christian history.
Michael Servetus became a hunted heretic for most of his adult life. He changed his name, and for most of a generation became first the foremost geographer in Europe, writing an extensive revision of Ptolemy’s still standard text which made Servetus the founder of comparative geography. Servetus made his living for many years as a medical doctor, and discovered the basic facts of the circulation of the blood in the human body one hundred years before Harvey who was later credited with its discovery. Michael Servetus was finally caught in Geneva and burned at the stake by John Calvin.
Faustus Socinus was an Italian, an inheritor of the Italian humanists. He was from a famous northern Italian family already prominent among religious reformers. Faustus spent twelve years in the service of a nobleman, and found this idle life worthless. He escaped religious persecution first in southeastern Switzerland and then among the leading Protestants in Germany. There, he met Polish students and discovered that Poland, then among the most emancipated and forward-looking of European populations, had a rapidly expanding radical Protestant movement. Faustus Socinus ended up spending most of the rest of his life in Krakow, Poland. He became both the intellectual center of the Polish Unitarian movement and a diplomat of spiritual disputes. The Polish Unitarians took his name for their movement becoming Socinians.
The Socinians were genuinely radical Protestants. They believed strictly in a single benevolent God. They saw Jesus as person and guide. They believed that baptism must be an adult act. They found the New Testament to be a clear guide for a more emancipated society, a society that would treat people alike, freeing the serfs, treating women as people, asking each person to interpret scripture for themselves and to put the lessons of Jesus’ love into practical democratic societies. They also became the first serious Christian publicists, using the new printing press to produce their Racovian catechism, named for Racov, their created town which became a model for a practicing Christian society.
The Racovian Catechism announced Christian liberation to all of Europe. It challenged people to read and interpret the Bible using their own reason and experiences, to worship one God, to follow Jesus’ teachings of love, simple living, tolerance, and a willingness to change. The Socinians in Poland were challenged then persecuted, and eventually their communities burned and thousands killed, but their messages of freedom, reason and tolerance and their actual modeling of working Christian societies challenged people all over Europe for generations.
Transylvania is the mountainous western region of Romania; it is Hungarian speaking and was part of Hungary. On the Roman frontier, it was ruled through the centuries by Goths, Huns [thus the name Hungary], Magyars, Tatars, and finally the Turks. As a region constantly under attack, all its citizens for centuries were considered nobles with special warrior obligations and dispensations from normal taxation. Its people were traditionally spiritual Arians, with a strong tradition of monotheism who embraced Jesus’ humanity. They came naturally to Protestantism, and have had a continuous Unitarian history for more than 400 years.
Francis David was the man who popularized Unitarianism in Transylvania. His father was a Saxon shoemaker and his mother was from a Hungarian noble family. He studied in a local Franciscan school and then at Germany’s Wittenberg University. He returned to become the rector of a Catholic school, but soon accepted the Reformation and became the superintendent of all the Hungarian Lutheran churches and their public champion in their debates with the Calvinists. The young Transylvanian monarch, King John Sigismund, took a keen interest in religious questions and tended toward liberal views but he did not want religious differences to divide his people. In 1568, King John Sigismund declared the first European edict of religious toleration: “everyone may freely embrace the religion and faith that they preferred and may support preachers of their own religion, but differing religious parties shall not disturb the other’s worship, do harm or inflict injury upon the others.”
Francis David became the King’s court preacher. He increasingly argued against the doctrine of the Trinity. A master debater, he not only convinced the intellectuals but swayed the multitudes with his arguments. Using examples of well-known religious art, he made the doctrine of the Trinity nonsensical to most of his people. He mounted a large boulder on a street corner and convinced most of the people on the spot of the truth of the Unitarian doctrines that this dual nature of Christ was both unscriptural and unreasonable. Wilbur argues that Unitarianism proved so enduring in Transylvania because it held closely to most Christian principles and kept its focus clearly upon Jesus’ life and teachings. Perhaps Francis David’s most radical notion was that Christ should not be invoked in prayer. That Jesus had always prayed only to God, and that Christians should do the same, revering Jesus but praying only to God.
Francis David’s most famous summary is in our hymnal, #566:
“In this world there have always been many opinions about faith and salvation. You need not think alike to love alike. There must be knowledge in faith also. Sanctified reason is the lantern of faith. Religious reform can never be all at once, but gradually step by step. If they offer something better, I will gladly listen. The most important spiritual function is conscience, the source of all spiritual joy and happiness. Conscience will not be quieted by anything less than truth and justice. We must accept God’s truth in this lifetime. Salvation must be accomplished here on earth. God is indivisible. God is one.” After King John Sigismund died, Francis David kept winning debates and changing his peoples’ hearts, but he died in prison for his religious liberalism.
Three Europeans, more than 400 years ago, yet their courage, fortitude, and insights still reverberate today. Freedom, reason and tolerance will always be under attack. Michael Servetus challenged people to live Christian lives using Jesus as a model. Faustus Socinus actually set up a Christian society liberating people in ways that were not to become common until the 20th century. Francis David focused upon the freedom of individual conscience and religious democracy. Yes, we are free as Unitarians to have our own spiritual journeys, but we are free because thousands of brave people, like these three men and their movements, made room for the human conscience and created institutional and political space for religious democracy. May we do the same in our lives, by the leaders we support and by our own daily deeds.