Trinitarianism. "All those who believe in a Trinity in the essence
of God are tritheists"; and, he added, they are "true atheists" as
deniers of the One God. `062158 This was youthfully extreme, but
Servetus tried to soften his heresy by inditing rhapsodies on Christ
as the Light of the World; most of his readers, however, felt that
he had extinguished the light. As if to leave no stone unhurled, he
concurred with the Anabaptists that baptism should be given only to
adults. Oecolampadius and Bucer repudiated him, and Servetus,
reversing Calvin's itinerary, fled from Switzerland to France (1532).
On July 17 the Inquisition at Toulouse issued a warrant for his
arrest. He thought of going to America, but found Paris more
agreeable. There, disguising himself as Michel de Villeneuve (the
family name), he studied mathematics, geography, astronomy, and
medicine, and flirted with astrology. The great Vesalius was his
fellow student in dissection, and their teachers praised them equally.
He quarreled with the dean of the medical faculty, and seems in
general to have given offense by his impetuosity, passion, and
pride. He challenged Calvin to a debate, but did not appear at the
appointed place and time (1534). In the furore over Cop's address
and the heretical placards, Servetus, like Calvin, left Paris. At
Lyons he edited a scholarly edition of Ptolemy's Geography. In
1540 he moved to Vienne (sixteen miles south of Lyons), and there he
lived till his last year, practicing medicine and scholarship. Out
of so many scholars available to the Lyons publishers-printers, he was
chosen to edit a Latin translation of the Bible by Santes Pagnini. The
work took him three years, and ran to six volumes. In a note on Isaiah
7:14, which Jerome had rendered "a virgin shall conceive," Servetus
explained that the Hebrew word meant not virgin but young woman, and
he suggested that it referred not prophetically to Mary but simply
to Hezekiah's wife. In the same spirit he indicated that other
seemingly prophetic passages in the Old Testament referred only to
contemporary figures or events. This proved disconcerting to
Protestants and Catholics alike.
We do not know when Servetus discovered the pulmonary circulation of
the blood- the passage of the blood from the right chamber of the
heart along the pulmonary artery to and through the lungs, its
purification there by aeration, and its return via the pulmonary