742 THE REFORMATION IN FRENCH SWITZERLAND.
but a three-parted, collective, composite God — that is, an unthinkable, impossible God, which is no God at all. They worship three idols of the demons, — a three-headed monster, like the Cerberus of the Greek mythology.^ One of their gods is unbegotten, the second is begotten, the third proceeding. One died, the other two did not die. Why is not the Spirit begotten, and the Son proceeding? By distinguishing the Trinity in the abstract from the three persons separatel}^ considered, they have even four gods. The Talmud and the Koran, he thinks, are right in opposing such nonsense and blasphemy.
He examines in detail the various patristic and scholastic proof texts for the Trinity, as Gen. 18 : 2 ; Ex. 3 : 6 ; Ps. 2 : 7 ; 110:1; Isa. 7:14; John 1 : 1 ; 3:13; 8:58; 10:18; 14:10; Col. 1 : 15 ; 2:9; 1 Pet. 3 : 19 ; Heb. 1 : 2.
Yet, after all, he taught himself a sort of trinity, but substitutes the terms "dispositions," "dispensations," "economies," for hypostases and persons. In other words, he believed, like Sabellius, in a trinity of revelation or manifestation, but not in a trinity of essence or substance. He even avowed, during the trial at Geneva, a trinity of persons and the eternal personality of Christ ; but he understood the term " person " in the original sense of a mask used by players on the stage, not in the orthodox sense of a distinct hypostasis or real personality that had its own proper life in the Divine essence from eternity, and was manifested in time in the man Jesus.^
1 Rest. 59, 119, etc. On these expressions, which shocked the pious feelings of all Christendom, see above, § 141, p. 719.
2 In his last reply to Calvin (0/)e?-a, VIII. 536), he tells him: " Mentiris. Trinitatem ego voco, et doceo, verissimam trinitatem. . . . Reals discrimen tollo, non personale. . . . Realem in Deo distinctionem ego repudio." Calvin, in his Institutes (I. ch. XIII. § 22) gives the following account of the trinity of Servetus : " The word Trinity was so odious and even detestable to Servetus, that he asserted all Trinitarians, as he called them, to be atheists. I omit his impertinent and scurrilous language, but this was the substance of his speculations: That it is representing God as consisting of three parts, when three persons are said to subsist in his essence, and that this triad is merely
§ 147. THE THEOLOGICAL SYSTEM OF SERVETUS. 743
Servetus distinguished — with Plato, Philo, the Neo-Platonists, and several of the Greek Fathers — between an ideal, invisible, uncreated, eternal world and the real, visible, created, temporal world. In God, he says, are from eternity the ideas or forms of all things : these are called " Wisdom " or " Logos," "the Word" (John 1:1). He identifies this ideal world with " the Book of God," wherein are recorded all things that happen (Deut. 32 : 32 ; Ps. 139 : 16 ; Rev. 5 : 1), and with the living creatures and four whirling wheels full of eyes, in the vision of Ezekiel (1:5; 10:12). The eyes of God are living fountains in which are reflected all things, great and small, even the hairs of our head (Matt. 10 : 30), but particularly the elect, whose names are recorded in a special book.
The Word or Wisdom of God, he says, was the seed out of which Christ was born, and the birth of Christ is the model of all births.^ The Word may be called also the soul of Christ, which comprehends the ideas of all things. In Christ was the life, and the life was the light of the world (John 1 : 4 sqq.). He goes here into speculations about the nature of light and of the heavenly bodies, and ventilates his Hebrew learning. He distinguishes three heavens — the two material heavens of water and air, spoken of by Moses in
imaginary, being repugnant to the divine unity. At the same time he maintained the persons to be certain external ideas, which have no real subsistence in the divine essence, but give us a figurative representation of God under this or the other form ; and, that in the beginning there was no distinction in God, because the Word was once the same as the Spirit; but that after Christ appeared God of God, there emanated from him another God, even the Spirit. Though he sometimes glosses over his impertinencies with allegories, as when he says that the eternal Word of God was the Spirit of Christ with God, and the reflection of his image, and that the Spirit was a shadow of the Deity; yet he afterwards destroys the deity of both, asserting that according to the mode of dispensation there is a part of God in both the Son and the Spirit; just as the same Spirit substantially diffused in us, and even on wood and stones, is a portion of the Deity."
1 " Verbum ipsum Dei quod erat semen generationis Christi. . . . Ipsa Christi generatio sit aliornm generationnm omnium specimen et prototi/pus. . . . Vere fmt in Deo snhstnntiale semen Christi, et in eo rerum omnium seminales rationes, et exemplares formce.''^ Rest. p. 140.