656 THE REFORMATION IN FRENCH SWITZERLAND.
3. The peace of the Italian congregation was again disturbed by GiovANNE Valenti Gentile of Calabria, a schoolmaster of some learning and acuteness, who was attracted to Geneva by Calvin's reputation, but soon imbibed the sentiments of Gribaldo and Biandrata. He was one of the six members who had at first refused to sign the Italian confession of faith. Soon after the departure of Biandrata and Alciati he openly professed their views, urged, as he said, by his conscience. He charged the orthodox doctrine of the Trinity with quaternity, — adding a general divine essence to the three divine essences of Father, Son, and Spirit, — and maintained that the Father was the only divine essence, the " essentiator." Both these ideas he borrowed from Servetus. The Son is only an image and reflection of the Father.
Gentile was thrown into prison, July, 1557, by order of the Council, on the charge of violating the confession he had signed. He repeated his views and appealed to the ministers and the Council for protection against the tyranny of Calvin, but he was refuted by the ministers. At last he apologized for his severe language against Calvin, whom he had always revered as a great man, but he refused to recant his views. The Council asked the judgment of five lawyers, who decided that, according to the imperial laws (De summa Trinitate et fide catholica et de hereticis). Gentile deserved death by fire. The Council, instead, pronounced the milder sentence of death by the sword (Aug. 15). It seems that Calvin's advice, which had been disregarded in the case of Servetus, now prevailed in the case of Gentile.
The fear of death induced Gentile to withdraw his charges against the orthodox doctrine, and to sign a brief confession of faith in three divine Persons in one Essence, and in the unity, coequality, and coeternity of the Son and Holy Spirit with the Father. He was released of the sentence of death ; yet in view of his perjury, his heresies, and false accusations against the Church of Geneva, he was condemned by the
§ 131. THE ITALIAN ANTITRINITARIANS IN GENEVA. 657
magistrates to make an amende honorable^ that is, in his shirt, bareheaded, and barefooted, with a lighted torch in his hand, to beg on his knees the judge's pardon, to burn his writings with his own hand, and to walk through the principal streets under the sound of the trumpet. The sentence was carried out on the second of September. He submitted to it with surprising readiness, happy to escape death at such a cheap price. He also promised on oath not to leave the city without permission.
But he was hardly set at liberty when he escaped and joined his friends Gribaldo and Alciati at Farges. Soon afterwards he spent some time at Lyons. He studied the ante-Nicene Fathers, wlio confirmed his subordinationism, and wrote a book (^Antidota) in defence of his views and against the chapter on the Trinity in Calvin's Institutes. He declared that the orthodox terms of hovioousia, person, substance, trinity, unity, were profane and monstrous, and obscured the true doctrine of the one God. He also attacked the doctrine of the two natures in Christ and the communication of attributes as idle speculations, which should b^" banished from the Church. He borrowed from Origen the distinction between the original God (avroOeo'^^, that is,, the Father and the derived or secondary God (^6e6<i, Sevrepcdeos, erepoOeo'i') — that is, the Son. The Father alone is God in the strict sense of the term — the essentiator ; the Son is essentiatus and subordinate. He spoke most disrespectfully and passionately of the orthodox views. Calvin refuted his opinions in a special book (1561).
Gentile roused the suspicion of the Catholic authorities in Lyons and was imprisoned, but was set free after fifty days on his declaration that his writings were only opposed to Calvinism, not to orthodoxy.
But he felt unsafe in France, and accepted, with Alciati, an invitation of Biandrata to Poland in the summer of 1563.
After the roval edict, which expelled all the Antitrinit;!-