Killing for non
violent behavior or for one’s beliefs occurs in almost all eras of history. The
Old Testament is filled with episodes of killings based on idol worship,
disobedience, dishonoring a parent, belonging to a particular ethnic group
(such as the Amalekites), and unspecified offenses against God (see Genesis 38
and the story of Onan and his brothers). The New Testament tells the story of
Jesus killed for his beliefs. The last
two millennia are litanies of killings based on religion. The creed settled by the Catholic Church
could not be easily breeched without punishment to heretics. Sometimes they
lost their jobs. Sometimes they were
imprisoned. At its worst, the heretics
were put to death. The Reformation led
to the death of Michael Servetus (not by Catholics but by Calvin who was
outraged by Servetus’s heresies). It also led to the death of Giordano Bruno in
Rome, also burned at the stake for refusing to reject his own beliefs and
writings. Servetus and Bruno are unusual
in their beliefs because they were priests of the Catholic Church who both
rejected the Trinity. Servetus is a founder of Unitarianism with his book “On
the Errors of the Trinity.” Bruno also
rejected the virgin birth of Jesus and the transubstantiation of the blood and
body of Christ during the ritual of the Eucharist.
What is also
unusual is that both Servetus and Bruno were scientists. Servetus independently discovered the
circulation of the blood (at least the role of the heart and lungs in “purifying”
the air we breathe in and out). Servetus taught map-making, medicine, and
astronomy as well as courses in theology.
Bruno taught mathematics, mnemonic methods of memory, and astronomy as
well as philosophy as he went through seven or eight universities in his teaching
career. None of Servetus’s scientific work
was at issue in his condemnation by both Protestant and Catholic agents seeking
his arrest. It was luck that he was tried by Calvin’s court in Geneva rather
than brought back to Italy for trial by the Church. Bruno’s science was tied to his religious beliefs
and those scientific beliefs were only one of seven charges of heresy against
him. Bruno accepted the Copernican model
of a solar system in which the earth was the third planet orbiting the sun. He
correctly identified the sun as a star. He then inferred that all stars had
planets and that life must exist on most or all of them. He also believed the universe was infinite
and thus life, the material world, and God are all names of one ultimate reality
or God. That heresy the Church
identified as pantheism.
Galileo also
endorsed Copernicus’s model and offered evidence from his use of the telescope
he made which revealed moons around Jupiter (he calculated their orbits and
predicted their positions on any given day provided to him), craters and
mountain ranges on the moon, Saturn’s rings (he called them “ears” because of
the way they were tilted), the phases of Venus, and the sunspots on the sun
which allowed him to calculate the sun’s rotation and proving the sun was not a
perfect globe. Galileo was charged with
disobedience because his published works ridiculed the prevailing Ptolemaic
model of the earth as the center of the universe. Luther and Calvin were in full agreement with
the Catholic Church that the heliocentric model should be condemned because it
implied the biblical account of the universe was false. Galileo lucked out and
avoided a death sentence. He chose to
confess his error, denounce his publications, and spend the rest of his life in
house arrest.
It took a long
time for the crime of heresy to be seen as an error of belief and not as a
capital crime. In many parts of the world
heresy can still be used to justify a death sentence. Even where
it may not be a government policy, individuals can convince themselves that
heretics should be silenced by death rather than by the superior arguments they
should try to muster in defense of their own beliefs.
