§ 127. C-\LVESISM AND UNITARIAN IS.M. Gol
Thus the seeds for a new and heretical type of Protestantism were abundantly sown by these Italian refugees in the soil of the Swiss Churches, which had received them with open-hearted hospitality.
Fausto Sozini (1539-1604) formulated the loose heterodox opinions of this school of sceptics into a theological system, and organized an ecclesiastical society in Poland, where thev enjoyed toleration till the Jesuitical reaction drove them away. Poland was the Xorthern home of the Italian Renaissance. Italian architects bmlt the great churches and palaces in Cracow. Warsaw, and other cities, and gave them an Italian aspect. Fausto Sozini spent some time in Lyons. Ziirich (where he collected the papers of his uncle), and Basel, but labored chiefly in Poland, and acquired great influence with the upper classes by his polished manners, amiability, and marriage with the daughter of a nobleman. Yet he was once mobbed by fanatical students and priests at Cracow, who dragged him through the stieets and destroyed his library. He bore the persecution like a philosopher. His ^nitings were published by his nephew. Wiszowaty. in the fii'st two volumes of the BibUothecafratrum J'ol&norunu 1656.
This is not the place for a full history of Socinianism. We have only to do with its initiatory movements in Switzerland, and its connection with Calvin. But a few general remarks wUl facilitate an understanding.
Socinianism, as a system of theology, has largely affected the theology of orthodox Protestantism on the Continent during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and was succeeded by modern Unitarianism. which has exerted considen\ble influence on the thought and literature of England and America in the nineteenth centiuy. It forms the extreme left wing of Protestantism, and the antipode to Calvinism. The Socinians admitted that Calvinism is the only logical system on the basis of universal depravity- and absolute foreknowledge and foreordination : but they denied these pre-
632 THE KEFOKMATION IN FilENCH SWITZERLAND.
mises, and taught moral ability, free-will, and, strange to say, a limitation of divine foreknowledge. God foreknows and foreordains only the necessary future, but not the contingent future, which depends on the free-will of man. The two systems are therefore directly opposed in their theology and anthropology.
And yet there is a certain intellectual and moral affinity between them ; as there is between Lutheranism and Rationalism. It is a remarkable fact that modern Unitarianisra has grown up in the Calvinistic (Presbyterian and Independent) Churches of Geneva, France, Holland, England, and New England, while Kationalism has been chiefly developed in Lutheran Germany. But the reaction is also found in those countries.
The Italian and Polish Socinians took substantially the same ground as the English and American Unitarians. They were opposed alike to Romanism and Calvinism ; they claimed intellectual freedom of dissent and investigation as a right ; they elevated the ethical spirit of Christianity above the dogmas, and they had much zeal for higher liberal education. But they differ on an important point. The Socinians had a theological system, and a catechism; the modern Unitarians refuse to be bound by a fixed creed, and are independent in church polity. Tliey allow more liberty for new departures, either in the direction of rationalism and humanitarianism, or in the opposite direction of supernaturalism and trinitarianism.
Calvin was in his early ministry charged with Arianism by a theological quack (Caroli), because he objected to the damnatory clauses of the pseudo-Athanasian creed, and expressed once an unfavorable opinion on the Nicene Creed.^ But his difficulty was only with the scholastic or metaphysical terminology,^ not with the doctrine itself ; and as to the
^ As a, " carmen cantillando magis aptmn, quam confessionis formula." In his tract De vera Ecclesice reformatione. Comp. § 82, pp. 351 sq.
- ovaia, vn6(Traffis, trpoaanrop, essentia, substantia, persona, etc., and other terms of the Nicene age.
§ 128. CALVIN AND L^LIUS SOCINUS. 633
divinity of Christ and of the Holy Spirit, he was most emphatic.
It is chiefly due to Calvin's and Bullinger's influence that Unitarianism, which began to undermine orthodoxy, and to unsettle the Churches, was banished from Switzerland. It received its death-blow in the execution of Servetus, who was a Spaniard, but the ablest and most dangerous antitrinitarian. His case will be discussed in a special chapter.