One day in 16th century
Europe, the Spanish theologian and physician Michael Servetus was arrested after
attending a sermon by the influential Protestant reformer John Calvin. Servetus
was charged with heresy for questioning the doctrine of the trinity and for
arguing against infant baptism. Calvin denounced Servetus for what he termed
“execrable blasphemies” and advocated for the death penalty to be applied. Sure
enough, the city council of Geneva, Switzerland sentenced Servetus to be
executed, and on October 27, 1553, he was burnt alive atop a pyre of his own
books.
Calvin was an ardent defender of
this barbarism* and was unapologetic in justifying harsh penalties for
blasphemers and heretics:
“Some
say that because the crime consists only of words that there is no cause for
such severe punishment. But we muzzle dogs; shall we leave men free to open
their mouths and say what they please?...God makes it plain that the false
prophet is to be stoned without mercy. We are to crush beneath our heels all
natural affections when his honour is at stake. The father should not spare his
child, nor the husband his wife, nor the friend that friend who is dearer to
him than life."
Many other Protestant leaders at
the time shared Calvin’s views. The German reformer Philipp Melanchthon in
particular applauded Servetus’s execution, writing in a letter to Calvin:
“I
affirm that your magistrates did right in punishing, after a regular trial,
this blasphemous man."
But the chorus of approval was not
unanimous. One notable dissenter was the French preacher Sebastian Castellio, a
prominent critic of Calvin who was an early proponent of religious toleration. Castellio
was outraged over Servetus’s execution, which he viewed as murder. He even
spoke of Calvin’s hands “dripping with the blood of Servetus.” Indeed,
Castellio made the case for why killing heretics in general was an absurd idea:
“Calvin
says that he is certain, and [other sects] say that they are; Calvin says that
they are wrong and wishes to judge them, and so do they. Who shall be judge?
What made Calvin the arbiter of all the sects, that he alone should kill? He
has the Word of God and so have they. If the matter is certain, to whom is it
so? To Calvin? But then why does he write so many books about manifest truth?...In
view of the uncertainty we must define the heretic simply as one with whom we
disagree. And if then we are going to kill heretics, the logical outcome will
be a war of extermination, since each is sure of himself.”
In a society where it is acceptable
to kill anyone you disagree with, the inevitable result is constant warfare
between sects, a scenario which is desirable to no one. Castellio argued that everyone would be better off in a
society that allows dissent and where disagreements are settled with civilized
debate:
"When
Servetus fought with reasons and writings, he should have been repulsed by
reasons and writings.”
This of course seems obvious
looking through the lens of modernity, but clearly it was not always so. The
reason we no longer have to fear being burned at the stake, no matter what
criticisms we may voice about this or that religious doctrine, is that people
like Sebastian Castellio put forth arguments for why that practice should be
abolished. Castellio provided reasons to convince his fellow citizens to make a
change in their society, and for that we should be grateful to him.
There are a plethora of examples of
other great thinkers from history who also deserve credit for advancing moral
progress. In each case, they used reason to demonstrate why a certain practice
was unjustifiable or inconsistent with values already held. Take the Italian
jurist Cesare Beccaria, who argued against cruel punishments such as breaking
on the wheel in his 1764 pamphlet On
Crimes and Punishments:
“As
punishments become more cruel, the minds of men, which like fluids, always
adjust to the level of the objects that surround them, become hardened, and
after a hundred years of cruel punishments, breaking on the wheel causes no
more fear than imprisonment previously did. For a punishment to achieve its
objective, it is only necessary that the harm that it inflicts outweighs the
benefit that derives from the crime, and into this calculation ought to be
factored the certainty of punishment and the loss of the good that the
commission of the crime would produce. Everything beyond this is superfluous,
and therefore tyrannical.”
Or the English Enlightenment thinker
John Locke, who criticized slavery in Two Treatises of Government in 1689 because it was inconsistent with the principles of rational government:
“Freedom
of men under government is to have a standing rule to live by, common to
everyone of that society, and made by the legislative power erected in it; a
liberty to follow my own will in all things where that rule prescribes not; not
to be subject to the inconstant, uncertain, unknown, arbitrary will of another
man, as freedom of nature is to be under no other restraint but the law of
nature.”
One of my personal favorites is the
philosopher Jeremy Bentham, who is considered to be the founder of
utilitarianism. Bentham was a thinker well ahead of his time as he advocated in
the 18th and 19th centuries for the separation of church
and state, freedom of expression, equal rights for women, the right to divorce,
the abolition of slavery, the abolition of the death penalty, and the abolition
of physical punishment, including that of children.1 He also called
for the decriminalization of homosexuality in a 1785 essay on the grounds that
it doesn’t cause harm to anyone:
“As
to any primary mischief, it is evident that [homosexuality] produces no pain in anyone. On
the contrary, it produces pleasure. The partners are both willing. If either of
them be unwilling, the act is an offence totally different in its nature of
effects. It is a personal injury, a kind of rape. As to any danger exclusive of
pain, the danger, if any, must consist in the tendency of the example. But what
is the tendency of this example? To dispose others to engage in the same
practices. But this practice produces no pain of any kind to anyone.”
When I read the words of these
great men, I am almost moved to tears. Others may take for granted the rights
we enjoy in the 21st century, but I won’t, for I understand the long,
arduous process that brought us to this point. The expansion of human rights
that has occurred throughout history was not a development that came easily,
and there was resistance every step of the way. But it never would have
happened if not for those brave reasoners who courageously voiced their
dissent, even when it was immensely unpopular and even dangerous to do so. Somebody had to be
there making the case for these changes or else we’d still be burning heretics
at the stake. I am incredibly grateful to every person who used reason to turn
the wheels of moral progress, and not just the famous thinkers who published books
and essays but even the regular folk who put forth the arguments to their
neighbors and family and whose names I shall never know. As the voyage towards
peace has unfolded over many generations, most of these reasoners never lived
to see the triumph of their ideas. But we have inherited our world from them as
the benefactors of their resolve. We are standing on the shoulders of giants.
But we can no longer rely on these
giants to continue to shape our civilization, for they lie motionless in their
graves. Castellio has made his last argument. Locke won’t publish any more books. Bentham will forevermore remain silent. With a profound sense of amazement
and even fear, the realization dawns upon us that it is we, in our
ordinariness, who are here.
The torch of reason is now in our
hands, and it is our task to carry it as far as we can. We must provide reasons
to our fellow citizens to convince them to transform our society. So, which
arguments should we make? Just as we look back at our heretic-burning,
slave-owning, barbaric ancestors of the past, dumbfounded by their savagery, what
practices do we, being the unenlightened 2014-ians that we are, engage in that our
descendants will look back at and wonder, “What were they thinking? How could
they be so cruel?” Are there any 21st century customs for which the
arguments against them are sound and there for all to see, but which the
zeitgeist of our era stubbornly refuses to accept? I opt for the following:
- The mistreatment of animals on factory farms
- The imprisonment of non-violent drug offenders
- Human contribution to climate change
- Scrimping on donations to life-saving charities in the developing world
- The possession of nuclear weapons
*To be fair, Calvin wanted Servetus to be decapitated rather than burnt. How merciful.
Here is the WONDERFUL video that inspired me to write this post:
1. “Jeremy Bentham.” Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., 17 May 2014. Web. 20 May 2014. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeremy_bentham>
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