"Out of the Flames" by Lawrence and Nancy Goldstone

The scholar who enraged Calvin and inspired the Unitarians was gruesomely executed for writing a book.

By Peter Kurth

Nov 12, 2002 | The next time someone tries to persuade you that Islam (for instance) is a "backward" religion, you can refer them to Lawrence and Nancy Goldstone's "Out of the Flames: The Remarkable Story of a Fearless Scholar, a Fatal Heresy, and One of the Rarest Books in the World." The Goldstones' rousing title reflects both the style and confidence of their work: Bigots don't stand a chance against this brisk and wonderfully readable account of perfidy and murder in the Protestant Reformation.

The "Fearless Scholar" of "Out of the Flames" is the 16th-century Spanish physician, philosopher and mystical theologian Michael Servetus (1511-1553), the guiding spirit, though not an actual founder, of the Unitarian Church. The "Fatal Heresy" is Servetus' denial of the doctrines of the trinity and original sin. And the very rare book, thought at the time of Servetus' death to be the last copy in existence, is his "Christianismi Restitutio" ("The Restoration of Christianity"), which was strapped to his side when he was burned alive in Geneva in 1553, more or less at the connivance of his sworn enemy and Protestant rival, John Calvin.

You thought you knew about burning at the stake? You've haven't read the Goldstones' account. In the 16th century, burning was reserved exclusively for the crime of heresy, the worst on earth. "It was never over quickly," the Goldstones write. Hollywood has it all wrong: "The whole point of burning at the stake was to subject the condemned to prolonged, horrible, unendurable pain." Chained to a post, his neck bound with rope, Servetus was also forced to wear "a crown of straw, doused in sulphur," at his execution. Green wood was used for the pyre, fresh-cut branches with the leaves still on them:

"The fire was lit. Green wood does not burn easily, does not roar up. It smokes and sputters, burning unevenly and slowly. And so Michael Servetus' life was not extinguished quickly in a blazing wall of fire. Rather, he was slowly roasted, agonizingly conscious the whole time, the fire creeping upward inch by inch. The flames licked at him, the sulphur dripped into his eyes, not for minutes but for a full half hour. 'Poor me, who cannot finish my life in this fire,' the spectators heard him moan. At last, he screamed a final prayer to God, and then his ashes commingled with those of his book."

Don't the Goldstones write well? I guarantee you won't read a more entertaining story this season -- part biography, part history, part mystery and part plea for justice, told in a style so cheerful and clear that you can almost forget the hideous nature of Servetus' fate. Other witnesses at his execution heard him cry out, "Jesu, thou Son of the eternal God, have mercy on me!" leading his enemies to say that if he'd only reversed the order of his words, from "Son of the eternal God" to "Eternal Son of God," his heresy would have been resolved on the spot. Servetus would still be horribly dead, but the souls of the living would be safe from his error.

Mercifully, the Goldstones tell the story of Servetus' death upfront, in their prologue; by the time he dies again, halfway through the book, they pass lightly over the details. The Goldstones are book collectors who write about books, and "Out of the Flames," as promised, is as much about the fate of Servetus' "Restitutio" as it is about Servetus himself. It's also about the history of printing and publishing. It's about humanism, scientific research and religious tolerance. It's about Gutenberg, Luther, Erasmus, Voltaire, Catherine de' Medici and Thomas Jefferson. "Out of the Flames" has something in it for everyone, including a happy ending -- or beginning, since again the authors tell us, right off the bat, that three copies of Servetus' work did escape the fire.

Indeed, without the survival of his writing, Servetus might have accomplished nothing in life apart from enraging Calvin, putting both the French and Spanish Inquisitions on his tail and earning himself a terrible fate. Born to the Spanish Catholic gentry in 1511 -- at a time, the Goldstones report, when "the medieval world, the Renaissance, the Inquisition, the New World, and the modern world all met" -- Servetus was marked in childhood as a prodigy and a brilliant mind: "By the time he was 13 years old, in addition to his native language, he could read French, Greek, Latin and, most significantly, Hebrew," a forbidden language in most of Europe. "Knowledge of Hebrew meant that the Old Testament could be read in its original form," the Goldstones explain -- a dangerous idea, ultimately, on both sides of the Catholic-Protestant line.

Growing up in Spain, with its large population of Jews and Muslims, Servetus' doubts about the Trinity took shape early -- three gods in one, he thought, made the infidel harder to convert. Later, as feared, he read the Bible and discovered "not one word about the Trinity, nor about its Persons, nor about Essence, nor about a unity of the Substance."

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