"Out of the Flames" by Lawrence and Nancy Goldstone

In time, Servetus would compare the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost to Cerberus, the three-headed dog who guards the entrance to Hell in classical mythology. All his life, he was frank with his opinions and brash in his remarks -- it was a mocking correspondence with Calvin that later got him burned. "Servetus was so smart," the Goldstones assert, "that it never seemed to occur to him that his arguments would be more effective if he didn't imply that anyone holding an opposing view was an idiot." From the beginning, "he learned to identify with the outcast."

Servetus' career followed the same veering course of all religious reformers and iconoclasts, taking him first to the University of Zaragossa, where he entered the service of the Franciscan friar Juan de Quintana, and later to Italy, when Quintana was appointed confessor to the Habsburg emperor Charles V. Having recently put Rome to the torch, Charles chose Bologna for his coronation, "the largest, grandest, most lavish affair of its time, a kind of inaugural ball, millennium party, and royal wedding all rolled into one."

The sack of Rome was widely regarded as the judgment of God visited on a Catholic hierarchy that had teemed with corruption for centuries, and in Bologna Servetus saw all he could stand of popes and princes. The pope was an agent of Satan, he would shortly conclude, and the papacy the devil's way of preventing the return of Christ. "Oh, the most evil of beasts," Servetus cried, "harlots most shameless." He joined the Protestant movement more or less on the spot.

For most of the rest of his life, Servetus was either in hiding or on the run: "Any remaining moderation he felt had been excised." Heading first to Basel, a Protestant stronghold where his penchant for reckless religious argument ultimately forced his departure, Servetus moved next to Strasbourg, in mainly Catholic France, where he wrote "De Trinitatis Erroribus" ("On the Errors of the Trinity") and got himself sentenced to death by the Spanish Inquisition.

"Not yet understanding the degree of animosity he had evoked," the Goldstones note ruefully, "but seeing only how his book was on everyone's lips, Servetus, like any new author buoyed by success, began sending out review copies. He tried to get quotes from Erasmus and Luther." In Servetus' day, however, buzz could kill.

When the Inquisition sent his own brother to entice him back to Spain, however, Servetus got the point -- "I was sought up and down to be snatched to my death," he complained. The Spanish heretic "Miguel Serveto" now moved to Paris and changed his name to "Michel de Villeneuve," an identity that served him well for 20-odd years, until the publication of his "Restitutio," his entrapment by Calvin and his death at the stake.

In the end, Servetus' heretical pronouncements argued less for a rejection of the trinity than for its reevaluation. He rejected the dual nature of Christ, arguing that he had one nature, at once divine and human, and was not a separate aspect of the godhead but was God come to earth. Unlike Calvin, Servetus didn't think that human beings are born depraved; thus, he couldn't accept the redemptive meaning of the crucifixion and resurrection. Grace, moreover, wasn't available to only a preselected few, as Calvin believed, but to all people with intelligence and will. "I say therefore that God himself is our spirit dwelling in us," Servetus declared, "and this is the Holy Spirit ... There is in our spirit a certain working latent energy, a certain heavenly sense, a latent divinity and it bloweth where it listeth and I hear its voice and I know not whence it comes nor whither it goes."

It was this liberal line of thought, combined with the cruelty and injustice of his death, that endeared Servetus to the nascent Unitarian movements in Poland and Transylvania and later crossed the ocean to inspire the Deists and freethinkers of America's Colonial age. "I confidently expect that the present generation will see Unitarianism become the general religion of the United States," Jefferson predicted in 1822 -- wrongly, of course.

According to the Goldstones, years of liberal religion in America left its practitioners still combing the Scriptures for guidance: "They had gotten so used to dissecting, parsing, and endlessly reinterpreting biblical phrases that they stopped doing anything else." It was Emerson, say the Goldstones, who turned this trend around and "shifted the emphasis back from the mind to the soul."

I'm leaving out big chunks of the story here. The Goldstones have built their narrative like a wheel, with the spokes aiming outward from Servetus at the center. No sooner are they through with Gutenberg, who died broke, than they're on to Fust and Schoeffer, early printers in Mainz, who produced the first Gutenberg Bible and made a bundle on the deal. Next comes public literacy and the sudden dissemination of printed material in Europe, which leads the Goldstones to humanism, Luther, Paracelsus and, after Servetus' death, to the Great Fire of London, the Empress Maria Theresa, the French revolution and those later physicians who, long after Servetus first discerned it, confirmed his observations about the circulation of blood through the lungs. This was "perhaps the single most important statement about the workings of the human body in 1500 years," and a discovery for which Servetus rarely receives his full share of credit.

But Servetus had "a genius for indiscretion," as the Goldstones know. He also believed that the devil entered the body through the lungs and that there were "Satanic" rituals of human sacrifice at the root of infant baptism. He practiced astrology, finding it "laughable that medical professors were too shortsighted to grasp that the stars affected the timing of cures." And it's doubtful that any contemporary Unitarian, no matter how ardent or New Age-y, could accept Servetus' staunch belief that his patron and namesake, Michael the Archangel, would end the world himself and redeem its souls, sometime around 1585. The Goldstones can't really be faulted for minimizing the loopier qualities of this astonishing martyr: They have so many interesting stories to tell, it's hard to know where to begin.

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